[HN Gopher] Infrastructure bill cryptocurrency surveillance prov...
___________________________________________________________________
Infrastructure bill cryptocurrency surveillance provision is a
privacy disaster
Author : abecedarius
Score : 378 points
Date : 2021-08-03 02:51 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| bob33212 wrote:
| I don't know why the crypto people expected anything else. They
| though that the government would just say:
|
| "Well since you have this cool new anonymous database technology
| we will just let you make billions of dollars and not tax it"
|
| Even more ridiculous is that 3rd world countries with sketchy
| governments are going to let their citizens move their money in
| and out of crypto.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Not a lot of people are actually making money. That would
| require conversion back to fiat. Nor are they buying goods and
| services. Basically they're just getting taxed on worthless
| trades between fake assets.
|
| The price goes up when money comes in. It goes down when money
| goes out. It's up because people are losing money, not gaining
| it. This is tautological.
| jl2718 wrote:
| I didn't read the bill, but here is the summary: "We're going to
| use violence against non-violence."
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Another problem is making "digital asset" the object of the
| regulatory restriction, which is so vague that it could include
| not only anything on the blockchain, but plenty of non-monetary
| digital items outside the blockchain too.
|
| It should specify digital currencies, because that is the only
| type of digital asset for which you find comparable regulations
| in the financial sector.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Then they'd have to define it as currency and they can't tax
| purchases made with currency.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Good! The sooner cryptocurrencies die, the better. The damage
| they are doing to society right now is immense, and it will only
| grow larger if they are not stopped.
| [deleted]
| dogman144 wrote:
| If this passes, which I think it will in some form, I believe the
| main impact will be a long-ish period of doublespeak between
| policy language and ability to enforce, eventually resolving in
| the end of the policy. This sounds so similar to the crypto
| (encryption) wars in the 90's: a general sense, but not actual
| understanding of how <cryptocurrencies/consumer encryption>
| actually works, but a desire to regulate it because the new tech
| fundamentally upends current approaches to the privacy and
| freedom of access to <spending/communications> in a digital
| forum.
|
| Overall, I've been cautiously optimistic on how a regulatory
| situation like this would go, once it actually launched, after
| hearing politicians like Sen Warner/Wyden talk about tech the
| last few years. However, I suppose the industry should have seen
| this coming after the recent Sen Warren "shadowy coders" comment
| about bitcoin core, and similar pushes from the UST across two
| admins.
|
| The crux:
|
| > "responsible for and regularly providing any service
| effectuating transfers of digital assets"
|
| KYC for all these entities, which almost sounds like it could
| include home routers, is technically impossible. Similarly to
| banning exports of a math proof (the crypto wars). USBs also
| enable transfer of digital assets. So do printers, if you go full
| cold wallet. Will USBs, home routers, and printers that I buy on
| amazon require my KYC/AML?
|
| I say that not to highlight how nonsensical this law is, but to
| highlight that this won't be enforceable. If they do try to
| enforce it, I bet it will be as an umbrella authorization to go
| after the miners, and.... we'll see what happens to crypto, as
| that's a dangerous threat to hashpower. If crypto survives a
| situation like that though in the short term, my sense is the
| regulation would drop away in the mid term, similar to the
| encryption regs in the 90s.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| This is my sense as well. Congress will pass overly broad
| language, then the actual regulators who actually have to put
| in place will be like " _what the fuck? how do we even conform
| to this?_ ". Regulators will most likely issue exemptions year-
| after-year and basically say " _we 're not going to enforce
| this year, but next year you guys really better have your stuff
| in line_"
|
| This is almost exactly how the individual health insurance
| mandate worked in the ACA. Ten years later, it's never been
| enforced a single time. It just gets waived, year after year.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is almost exactly how the individual health insurance
| mandate worked in the ACA. Ten years later, it's never been
| enforced a single time. It just gets waived, year after year.
|
| That is incorrect; it was in place and the shared
| responsibility penalty applied on taxes if the mandate was
| not adhered to from when it became effective in 2014 through
| 2018, but not after that because it was repealed by the Tax
| Cut and Jobs Act. It was _never_ "waived".
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| It can be a justification for addition of backdoors. If
| backdoors don't help, it's okay, they can be used for other
| purposes.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Will USBs, home routers, and printers that I buy on amazon
| require my KYC/AML?
|
| Of course not. Those are _products_ not _services_.
|
| Let's break down the statement in detail:
|
| > digital assets
|
| This is something I'd expect to be defined in the definitions
| section of the act. Even if it's not, the most reasonable
| interpretation is going to be something along the lines of any
| digital product whose ownership can be traded for material
| value gain, which would include cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and
| possibly MMO virtual currencies. There's definitely a lot of
| gray area in defining digital assets, but pretending that word
| documents and the like are digital assets is intentionally
| misreading the law.
|
| > effectuating transfers
|
| The plain definition of "effectuate" is "to bring about" or
| some other variation that specifically implies a causal link.
| To effectuate something requires that the agent itself is
| _causing_ it to happen. Mere incidental participation wouldn 't
| be sufficient. If I tell someone to take $1000 out of my ATM in
| cash and send it to somebody else in the mail, the person who
| is following my instructions is effectuating the transaction;
| the post office is not.
|
| > providing any service
|
| As mentioned above, we are specifically restricting this only
| to entities that are providing services, not products. So
| people whose roles are limited to providing products (such as
| software developers) are not affected by this rule.
|
| > responsible for and regularly providing
|
| And said services have to be provided on more than a one-off
| basis. So even the example I gave earlier of ordering someone
| to move money around wouldn't qualify; the person basically has
| to be willing to do this on an ongoing purpose, essentially as
| their business model, for this provision to kick in.
|
| In other words, the people who are affected by this are going
| to be those who are offering banking-like services for digital
| assets (e.g., cryptocurrencies, NFTs, WoW gold). Pedestrian
| things like routers and USBs are completely unaffected. The
| assertion of a sibling comment that software developers are
| potentially at risk is equally asinine. The people who are
| affected are the cryptocurrency exchanges, probably services
| like cryptocurrency tumblers, possibly miners or companies that
| operate MMOs.
| dogman144 wrote:
| It sounds like you have a much better handle on the law's
| terminology in application than the industry groups and legal
| /regulatory teams do, which is good.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > So people whose roles are limited to providing products
| (such as software developers) are not affected by this rule.
|
| If you can classify software development as providing a
| product and not a service then miners can certainly make the
| same argument regarding the data they produce. More easily,
| in fact, since they have no particular business relationship
| with the entities blindly submitting transactions to the
| network. Software developers are routinely involved in
| maintenance and support contracts, or producing new software
| to spec, which is more of a service than a product.
|
| The exchanges will be covered, of course, but they're so
| buried in onerous KYC/AML requirements already that they may
| not notice any difference.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Things like ENS/HNS domains will be some of that grey area
| for assets IMO. Right now I think a normal domain is a bit of
| a grey area (asset vs expense), but at least there's no
| reporting requirement for them.
|
| Will my (hypothetical) .eth domain be considered a digital
| asset?
| lvs wrote:
| This is unenforceable. Some of the relevant open source projects
| are being developed by contributors based outside the US who have
| no possibility of knowing whether the address receiving coins in
| a transaction is controlled by someone based in the US. It's not
| even possible within the design of bitcoin and related
| cryptocurrencies for developers to add such tracking provisions,
| since the generation of an address is algorithmic and can be done
| with pen and paper. If indeed the law is as the EFF describes it,
| it must have been written by someone with zero technical
| knowledge about cryptocurrency. This is not a viable regulatory
| approach. The implementation is not cognizable -- and therefore
| is not enforceable.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Then these open source developers should be careful to attend
| conferences in the US.
| trasz wrote:
| Except that US bullies other countries to persecute people
| who ignore US sanctions.
| onelastjob wrote:
| I agree that this provision is a disaster and will force a lot of
| cryptocurrency startups to incorporate outside of the US and also
| not offer their services to US customers. It's a real shame. The
| government should be able to get enough data for tax compliance
| just by making fiat on-ramps and off-ramps (aka exchanges)
| implement KYC (know your customer) rules.
| jl2718 wrote:
| The data is fully open already. They can't be this stupid.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > making fiat on-ramps and off-ramps (aka exchanges) implement
| KYC (know your customer) rules.
|
| That's already the case for most exchanges, and they also log
| trades and provide these logs to both individuals and taxation
| entities for EoY tax reporting purposes. The "problem" is that
| once you've converted fiat into crypto, you can use
| decentralized exchanges, and trade back and forth ad infinitum
| with no traceability. This is a problem because every single
| trade (crypto to crypto) is considered a taxable event, and on
| a decentralized exchange or centralized exchange that doesn't
| do KYC, there are no tax-specific records and therefore such
| transactions are unlikely to be recorded.
|
| Many people bemoan that it would be fairer and easier to just
| apply tax at the time crypto is converted into, and then out
| of, fiat. But a lot of profit can be earnt by the individual in
| between those on- and off-ramps, including the potential for
| profits to go, pardon the pun, into the ether, never to be seen
| again (by the government at least).
|
| The crypto die-hards are also moving towards the lack of
| necessity to cash out to fiat, which would render the off-ramp
| taxation less effective. This may be why there's a specific
| focus on stable coins, as they eschew the need for converting
| back to fiat.
| shanebrunette wrote:
| I am the founder of CryptoTaxCalculator.io and I am not sure
| where the idea of non traceability on DEXs comes from.
| Aggregating the transaction history is absolutely possible,
| all we need is the public wallet address. The real black box
| is around certain international exchanges that don't keep
| appropriate transaction records.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| You're right, yes. I was attempting to point out that with
| a DEX there is no way to enforce record keeping or KYC, and
| so if someone is determined to avoid tax, then DEXs won't /
| can't report back to a tax authority.
|
| Australian exchanges, as far as I've gathered, proactively
| send transaction details to the tax office, or are
| compelled to do so upon tax office request.
|
| When it comes to public wallet addresses, it becomes up to
| the individual to voluntarily declare their ownership -
| such is my understanding.
|
| I will defer to your knowledge and / or expertise if you
| disagree with my understanding, you need to know this stuff
| inside out - congrats on founding, and here's to a big
| future for crypto, you're well placed.
| DennisP wrote:
| If you bought crypto on a regulated exchange like
| Coinbase, which does KYC, then it's pretty easy for the
| government to find out that it was you who funded the
| address. After that everything's an open book.
|
| Theoretically you could claim that you were paying some
| other person, but then you'd have to explain what you
| paid for. And if you ever cash out your crypto to fiat,
| you'll have a lot more explaining to do.
|
| Privacy technologies would obscure the on-chain
| transactions but still not help with the basic problem.
| onelastjob wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. As long as the fiat on-ramps and off-
| ramps are KYC'ed everything that happens in between is an
| open book. The individual can just use cryptocurrency tax
| reporting software to provide a trade history for their
| taxes, and if they don't do that then the IRS can easily
| track all of their transactions since the IRS will know
| what addresses they are sending to from exchanges.
| There's no need for every DEX (or other service) along
| the way to KYC their users.
| orwin wrote:
| > will force a lot of cryptocurrency startups to incorporate
| outside of the US and also not offer their services to US
| customers
|
| Sad for rug pullers, US are the primary market for FOMO
| altcoins.
| pavlov wrote:
| The downsides listed are just cryptocurrency lobbyist talking
| points.
|
| _"Require new surveillance of everyday users of
| cryptocurrency;"_
|
| What everyday users? There's nothing you can do with this stuff
| except speculate, gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
|
| _"Force software creators and others who do not custody
| cryptocurrency for their users to implement cumbersome
| surveillance systems or stop offering services in the United
| States;"_
|
| Not offering these services seems like a positive outcome.
|
| _"Create more honeypots of private information about
| cryptocurrency users that could attract malicious actors;"_
|
| Losing your money to malicious actors is a standard part of the
| crypto experience already. Endless scams and ransomware don't
| seem to worry the author.
|
| _"Create more legal complexity to developing blockchain projects
| or verifying transactions in the United States--likely leading to
| more innovation moving overseas."_
|
| Ah, blockchain innovation, which is somehow so vital to the
| shining future of mankind, yet has utterly failed to produce
| anything of technological or economic value with the billions
| already invested. Overseas sounds like a fine place to continue
| this pseudoinnovation charade.
| nprz wrote:
| Bitcoin is a technology that improves individual freedoms. No
| institution can prevent you from holding or transferring
| bitcoin. When you buy a bitcoin you can remain confident there
| will never be more than 21 million btc minted, btc will never
| become diluted.
|
| Claiming the BTC protocol is without utility is completely
| disingenuous.
| acdha wrote:
| > Bitcoin is a technology that improves individual freedoms.
| No institution can prevent you from holding or transferring
| bitcoin.
|
| This is a common sales pitch but it's relying on the listener
| not thinking about the problem. Any government can prevent
| you from using Bitcoin by blocking your transactions: every
| transaction requires a network exchange and the same
| infrastructure which is used for things like the Great
| Firewall can trivially stop that as well.
|
| More importantly, however, that's a hypothetical situation
| for most people here. The realistic threats to think about
| stem from the difference between you being able to _make_ a
| transaction and not have any consequences for doing so.
| Bitcoin requires you to publish a full log of your
| transactions for your government to see -- if you don't
| report transactions, skip paying taxes, or conduct a transfer
| with someone on a blacklist, they can use the public ledger
| as a signed confession.
|
| Every transaction you make can be used to deanonymize you,
| and that sharply limits the use of Bitcoin because there's no
| demand for random numbers -- only real things you can do with
| them, which require physical presences which governments
| control. If your goal is to transfer money and flee the
| country, never coming back and writing off any friends or
| family left behind, Bitcoin might help. If your usage is
| anything else, you're just counting down until you or someone
| you interact with has their data compromised.
|
| Now, maybe you've also heard the marketing claims about
| mixers. Think about that a bit more carefully and you'll also
| realize the problems which make those unsafe in practice:
| beyond the expense, you're trusting the mixer operator not to
| be compromised, simply having any transaction linked to one
| is evidence that you're doing something illegal, and you have
| to worry about other users of the service using it for crimes
| which are serious enough to get more investigation than you
| personally are worth _and_ proving that you were not
| knowingly helping those people.
|
| If you were running the secret police somewhere, one of the
| best things you could do would be set up Bitcoin exchange and
| mixer services and promote them in your country so you'd have
| people giving you signed evidence of things you probably
| weren't even aware of.
| nprz wrote:
| You say all this, but where are all the thousands of silk
| road/DNM vendor/ransomware arrests? The gov has the tech to
| deanonymize these transactions, but fails to make any
| arrests?
| gruez wrote:
| >which is used for things like the Great Firewall can
| trivially stop that as well.
|
| I don't know how effective you think the great firewall is,
| but it's definitely not effective enough to "trivially
| stop" 500 bytes of banned data from being transferred.
| acdha wrote:
| It's an always-on network transferring non-trivial
| amounts of data. Do you really think it's that hard to
| block port 8333 and a list of known hosts? No, it won't
| be perfect but if it's not easy to use with standard
| clients few people are going to deal with it --
| especially with the knowledge that less than perfect
| attempts to do so is publishing a clear sign of intent.
|
| For a repressive government, that means that most people
| will steer clear which makes it easier to filter since
| you don't have a large volume of innocent traffic
| complicating analysis and by creating a great mechanism
| to get people to install spyware by circulating news
| underground of a great client which is preconfigured to
| evade the filter.
|
| If this is your threat model, cash is much safer.
| gruez wrote:
| >It's an always-on network
|
| you only need to be "on" to make transactions. In the
| case of sending transactions, you only need to broadcast
| the transaction itself (500 bytes), with no further
| traffic needed. The blockchain data is also broadcast via
| a satellite: https://www.blockstream.com/satellite/
|
| >transferring non-trivial amounts of data
|
| SPV clients require very little traffic, on the order of
| tens of kilobytes. Full nodes only need to download under
| 2MB worth every 10 minutes, or 3.33 KB/s. That's _very_
| easy to sneak under the radar if need be.
|
| >Do you really think it's that hard to block port 8333
| and a list of known hosts
|
| good thing you can run bitcoin as a tor hidden service.
|
| >If this is your threat model, cash is much safer.
|
| Except you need to be in-person to make transactions.
| goatmeal wrote:
| a big chunk of the population believes that the government
| should have a total monopoly over the issuance of currency
| and they should be able to control every aspect of how it
| gets accounted for and who should facilitate transactions, in
| order to prevent crime. these people have a complete
| disregard for individuals who are treated unfairly by the
| financial system. when some people are shut out of their
| access to banking and payment processing despite not doing
| anything illegal, and when others are unable to do business
| due to too much administrative overhead imposed by financial
| regulation, their suffering is excusable because crime is
| being prevented.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > What everyday users? There's nothing you can do with this
| stuff except speculate, gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
|
| Lie. I can receive payments from my foreign customers in a
| matter of 30 minutes instead of many days via traditional
| banking services or Draconian fees line PayPal. I can also
| safely donate to anti-Putin opposition.
| zeofig wrote:
| Another fantastically ignorant pontification on crypto, right
| here on Hacker News. Whether you like crypto or not (or whether
| you know anything about it or not), little of what you said is
| relevant to the point of the article in question.
| MelonTree wrote:
| > Ah, blockchain innovation, which is somehow so vital to the
| shining future of mankind, yet has utterly failed to produce
| anything of technological or economic value with the billions
| already invested.
|
| Cryptocurrencies have allowed me to feed my family back home in
| Lebanon, in a way that would simply not be possible with out
| it. I'm not sure if you don't think this happens on a daily
| basis, or is not of economic value.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > What everyday users? There's nothing you can do with this
| stuff except speculate, gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
|
| I literally know someone who pays their rent with zcash. It is
| possible to use it as, y'know, currency.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > Ah, blockchain innovation, which is somehow so vital to the
| shining future of mankind, yet has utterly failed to produce
| anything of technological or economic value
|
| Do you know what _economic value_ means? If there was no
| economic value, then it wouldn 't be used.
|
| Your comment sounds like one that will be hilarious in the not-
| so-distant future. It's analogous to the whole trope "X
| technology is useless" or "People will never need more than X
| amount of memory" type of thing.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >has utterly failed to produce anything of technological or
| economic value with the billions already invested. Overseas
| sounds like a fine place to continue this pseudoinnovation
| charade.
|
| One quiet place where blockchain makes sense is shared ledgers
| between large financial institutions, JPMorgan for example is
| working a lot on this. It's not about privacy or usurping the
| social order or whatever imaginative solution to all of
| society's problems that gets attached to so many other
| things... it's just a better API between institutions for
| transferring ownership between themselves, which is a frequent
| and often awkward (and ancient) tech.
|
| With blockchain you don't need a third party, with big
| institutions "theft" doesn't make sense. If there is an error
| and a transaction needs to be reversed it's in everybody's
| interest to do so and expected to happen from time to time and
| likely a built in feature.
|
| Simplifying way back end transactions between banks is pretty
| nice... for banks, but pretty uninteresting to most people
| because it's just about settling daily balances between
| institutions and the like which is really boring.
| user-the-name wrote:
| It's a worse API. In that situation, you have trusted
| parties. You don't need a blockchain, and the absolutely
| crippling tradeoffs it brings with it.
| pavlov wrote:
| This use case wouldn't be affected in any way by the proposed
| legislation because banks already know their customers.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > One quiet place where blockchain makes sense is shared
| ledgers between large financial institutions,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
|
| Usually refusing to share information or API is a business
| choice. Besides, once you have a closed group, you just have
| signed transactions ("permissioned blockchain"), and can
| (must) ditch proof-of-waste. So it barely resembles what
| people normally think of as blockchain and starts to look
| more like signed git commits.
| dannyw wrote:
| A vague, extraordinarily broad, and difficult to interpret
| statement is absolutely a disaster.
|
| You might not like cryptocurrency, but this is akin to the
| infrastructure bill having a provision classifying anyone
| "responsible for and regularly providing any service
| effectuating encryption of information" as a munitions-dealer
| -- with wide downstream implications on (1) open source
| software, and libraries like OpenSSL, etc, and (2) vague enough
| to cover pretty much every webmaster who uses TLS certificates.
| pydry wrote:
| Disaster for whom? If the side effect of this ambiguity is a
| mass exodus from crypto who loses out apart from speculators
| and the black market?
|
| I'd feel a lot more sympathetic if crypto uses cases didnt
| predominantly fall into those two camps (as is the case for
| cryptography).
| miracle2k wrote:
| Ambiguous laws are intrinsically harmful, so it is all
| citizen who lose out, who will be living under a legal
| regime that keeps on gradually degrading as people forget
| the principles it was built on.
| CPLX wrote:
| Here's an example of an ambiguous law:
|
| "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
| of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
| abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
| right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
| petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
| nybble41 wrote:
| The 1st Amendment is extremely clear. The only ones
| calling it "ambiguous" are those looking to invent
| exceptions to it out of whole cloth. "What, _' no law'_
| whatsoever? Clearly the authors and the representatives
| who passed this amendment couldn't have possibly objected
| to _my_ reasonable proposals, so there must be some
| subtle nuance of interpretation at odds with the
| perfectly plain and unambiguous language. "
| CPLX wrote:
| If you think the definitions of religion or the press
| aren't ambiguous I don't know what to tell you, and
| that's before we get into the exact meaning of the
| concept of "establishment"
| [deleted]
| pydry wrote:
| I agree that ambiguous laws are a bad idea in general. I
| still don't see how _all_ citizens lose out when most are
| explicitly unaffected though.
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| First they came for 'taxes' then they came for 'guns' and
| then they came for anything they wanted.
| the_real_sparky wrote:
| To be fair, proof of work crypto does impact electric
| infrastructure, although it's difficult to pin that on the
| negative or positive side of neutral because the cheapest
| electric rates possible include provisions for demand
| response / shut offs. The biggest operations will generally
| be trying to negotiate the cheapest rate possible, but that's
| not a given. Proof of work very much affects the generation
| side (generation costs for all customers, greenhouse gas
| emissions, etc) in the net negative though. The only
| exception to this would be on off-grid installations or
| installations on >100% renewable networks with complete
| demand response for the crypto and no other alternatives for
| exporting that power elsewhere. Even then it's creating
| useless waste heat, but meh. For what it's worth, I've owned
| Bitcoin and others in the past but now that I've had to deal
| with the impacts directly in my industry I'm definitely over
| my infatuation.
| trasz wrote:
| Developing Open Source software is not "services", unless you
| have a customer paying for it.
| nybble41 wrote:
| Plenty of open source projects receive funding for their
| work. Just running ads on your site to defray hosting
| expenses can be enough to get you classified as a
| commercial service these days.
| asah wrote:
| In case readers don't remember:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=encryption+munitions+1990s
|
| And of course the t-shirt:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+rsa+munitions+t+shirt
| eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
| You have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
| herendin2 wrote:
| IMO, you're probably right, but what you've written is even
| worse than the comment you're replying to. At least the OP
| tries to argue a point and offer some vague evidence. So
| please don't do this type of lazy driveby sniping here.
| Flagged.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter
| how ignorant someone is or you feel they are.
|
| If you know more than someone else, that's great--please
| share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. If
| you don't want to do that, that's fine, but then please don't
| post.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.
| ..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| whitepaint wrote:
| > What everyday users? There's nothing you can do with this
| stuff except speculate, gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
|
| ...
|
| https://compound.finance/
|
| https://pooltogether.com/
|
| https://polymarket.com/
|
| https://app.uniswap.org/
|
| https://rarible.com/
|
| https://axieinfinity.com/
|
| ...
|
| Anyone who has access to the internet can use the above (and
| it's just few examples, more on https://ethereum.org/) without
| any arbitrary restrictions set by any governments.
|
| How can you look at these things and not be in awe?
|
| And how on earth can somebody be so confident about something
| yet know so little about it?
| enlyth wrote:
| The websites you all listed are just vehicles for further
| speculation and gambling.
|
| Gaining interest on cryptocurrencies by providing liquidity
| so other people can speculate on cryptocurrencies, prediction
| markets (literally gambling on cryptocurrencies), NFTs
| (speculating on infungible cryptocurrency tokens), and some
| virtual game where you can further speculate on NFTs with a
| touch of gamification.
|
| Nothing seems to tie into any real world usefulness,
| everything ties back into itself where the core is always
| 'will the value of my internet coins go up'.
|
| The only single useful thing cryptocurrencies can do is you
| can buy drugs from the darkweb, semi-anonymously, or maybe
| completely if you use something like Monero.
| jondwillis wrote:
| You _could_ borrow a stablecoin like USDC with collateral
| on a platform like AAVE, trade the USDC for dollars or
| another currency that is accepted, and use it to buy a
| house, car, etc, without anyone 's approval or a bank being
| involved.
| notJim wrote:
| What would be the purpose of this with USDC though? Since
| you have to put in more than the loan amount as
| collateral, aren't you just paying to access your own
| money? For non-stablecoins that you don't want to sell,
| it makes more sense, although it seems risky.
| enlyth wrote:
| I'm curious because I don't know how this works exactly,
| how much collateral do you have to put up to borrow
| something on a decentralized exchange? If it's less than
| 100%, how is it enforced that I ever return the money,
| and if it's more, why would I borrow if I already have
| the money I need? Asking in good faith.
|
| Also if you plan to buy a house, a bank can give you a
| mortgage over let's say 25 years where information about
| your identity, income and credit history is used as a
| risk assessment, and the loan is backed by the whole
| existing legal system where your home can be repossessed
| if you fall behind on payments. You can get a LTV ratio
| of even 95% in some cases.
|
| How would this work in a decentralized way ever? On the
| other hand, if you already have, let's say 500k in the
| bank to buy the house outright, why would you involve
| cryptocurrency in the transaction. The counterparty is
| going to probably want to receive their money dollars in
| a bank somewhere, are you sure that a bank is not going
| to ask any questions when you do your magic conversions
| to dollars from crypto and try to send someone 500k?
|
| This doesn't integrate into the real world well unless
| the other person selling wants to receive crypto already
| and is ready to take upon all the risks themselves that
| transferring, accepting and holding cryptocurrency
| entails. At that point you don't need to do the
| conversion magic anyway.
| almostkorean wrote:
| It's all over-collateralized loans. So if I want $50k
| cash to buy a car, I can deposit $100k of ETH to borrow
| $50k USDC. As ETH price changes, your loan has a "health"
| score and if it gets below a certain threshold you can
| get liquidated if you don't start repaying the loan.
|
| The reason for involving crypto in this scenario is so
| you don't have to sell your crypto assets. This will be
| more useful going forward as platforms allow users to use
| NFTs as collateral for example.
| nprz wrote:
| Because the original commenter is not arguing in good faith.
| There are countless examples of crypto and bitcoin helping
| civilians escape tyrannical states, conveniently non were
| mentioned.
| foepys wrote:
| I read this all the time but have never seen proof of this.
| Can somebody please name a few if they are so countless?
| nprz wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYYh4aPXAM
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-
| of-co...
| bordercases wrote:
| Well let's see if they help now.
| penultimatename wrote:
| Countless examples, yet you failed to name a single
| specific example.
| nprz wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-
| of-co...
| notJim wrote:
| Most of these things are either likely to be fads (NFTs) or
| just ways to fuel the speculation and ponzi schemes (compound
| and uniswap.) Theoretically lending could be used for doing
| things in the real world I guess, but it seems like once the
| money is in crypto, it just sloshes around creating more
| crypto. The betting market is an interesting one, I hadn't
| seen that. IMO DAOs and DeFi are interesting, but I haven't
| seen it have a big effect outside of crypto yet.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Have you considered the possibility that existing regulation is
| one of the barriers to use of cryptocurrencies?
|
| Is it possible that there are uses for cryptocurrencies you
| have not iterated over in your comment?
|
| If I suggest that sub-cent microtransactions are a use of
| cryptocurrency that I find useful and have implemented in a
| hobby project, I predict the response will be, "but that's not
| wildly popular, speculation and gambling are widespread!"
|
| I don't accept that these widespread uses justify prohibition
| or over regulation. Even if we accept that these popular uses
| are worthy of prohibition, other developers should not be
| punished or unduly burdened because of the actions of the
| majority. This brings us back to the first point, if regulatory
| burdens are too high, individuals won't innovate.
|
| >There's nothing you can do with this stuff except speculate,
| gamble and build obfuscated Ponzis.
|
| >Not offering these services seems like a positive outcome.
|
| >has utterly failed to produce anything of technological or
| economic value
|
| This reads as, "Prohibit everything I personally dislike or
| can't fully appreciate"
|
| >Overseas sounds like a fine place to continue this...
|
| "If you don't like it leave the USA", this ignores the chilling
| effects the US's regulations have around the globe.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > Have you considered the possibility that existing
| regulation is one of the barriers to use of cryptocurrencies?
|
| Cryptocurrency has been largely unregulated since its
| inception and it's almost exclusively used for speculation
| and criminal activity. The barrier to use of cryptocurrency
| is that it provides nothing of value outside of those use
| cases, not regulation.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Look at the regulations already imposed on exchanges.
| Consider the legal and tax liabilities businesses take on
| by involving themselves with cryptocurrencies. Some nations
| have outright banned exchange of their national currency
| for cryptocurrency.
|
| If cryptocurrencies were not burdened by regulations, there
| wouldn't be the same informal market for person to person,
| cash to cryptocurrency transactions.
| trophycase wrote:
| This won't age well
| jasiek wrote:
| This is how you deal with an existential threat to USD.
| telxos wrote:
| 3. Tether
|
| 7. USD Coin
|
| 10. Binance USD
|
| Crypto seems rather reliant on USD. The crypto narratives are
| always so flimsy.
| elevenoh wrote:
| Projects bringing USD's value - namely globally credible &
| low-volatility price denomination - into crypto doesn't mean
| crypto is 'reliant on' USD.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Ha! I hadn't seen this particular paranoia-mixed-with-
| delusions-of-grandiosity for a while. In the first year or so
| of Bitcoin, the community was absolutely obsessed with the idea
| that "the Fed's" will come for them, to protect the mighty
| dollar. They were also certain they could withstand such
| efforts, since their fancy tech operated outside the reaches of
| the law.
|
| They were wrong on both counts: "the establishment" didn't
| react with aggressive attempts to shut them down, but really
| just some mild interest mixed with a bit of amusement.
|
| Only when, after a decade+, it had been proven beyond any doubt
| that the technology isn't useful for anything anyone cares
| about, and when it became more salient that the energy usage
| and the scale of fraud were growing out of control did they
| start pushing back. And with every single startup in the sector
| operating within the confines of law and the existing financial
| markets, there is absolutely no doubt that the law can regulate
| and/or shut down the industry within any reasonable meaning of
| the term.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Yeah, they can but they won't. They'll institutionalize
| everything you hate so much about the crypto markets today,
| and force you to invest in it by destroying your savings
| account, your house, and your 401k. Centralized fake crypto
| is the next big population-level banking scam.
| trophycase wrote:
| What? USD is already the dominant stablecoin. The US should be
| jumping for joy that they will remain the universal fiat even
| through the blockchain age.
|
| When Uniswap removed a bunch of coins from their front end,
| guess what they removed? sAUD, sEUR... but not sUSD. Very
| interesting don't you think?
| cinquemb wrote:
| > When Uniswap removed a bunch of coins from their front end
|
| I invite everyone to clone/fork (i've removed the google
| analytics stuff and emptied the black lists and made uniswap-
| info use the hashrouter):
|
| https://github.com/cinquemb/uniswap-info/ (deployed at
| https://cinquemb.github.io/uniswap-info)
|
| and
|
| https://github.com/cinquemb/uniswap-interface (deployed at
| https://cinquemb.github.io/uniswap-interface)
|
| To deploy yourselves you can (on gh, you can also run it
| locally):
|
| yarn install
|
| yarn build
|
| mkdir dist
|
| cd dist/
|
| cp -R ../build/* .
|
| git add -A
|
| git commit -m "GH pages"
|
| git push -f git@github.com:[your account]/uniswap-info.git
| master:gh-pages
| bacan wrote:
| Wait till you guys find out about the FACTA/CRS requirements.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Let's see:
|
| A Public keychain
|
| IS no the implied definition by itself not privacy based?
|
| I just do not see how more tracking on public info somewhat gives
| us less privacy when we did not have privacy on public keychain
| in the first place!
| shiado wrote:
| Anybody who has followed cryptocurrency in the last year knows
| that major US financial institutions and hedge funds have become
| heavily involved. The regulations coming are entirely to do with
| making the legal burdens of individual custody onerous enough
| that users place their coins on completely centralized exchanges
| to manage legal risk, all so these institutions have access to
| these coins for manipulation purposes like borrowing for
| shorting. The ONLY regulation you will see is on the average user
| so they can suck up coins like Daniel Plainview drinking your
| milkshake, NOT on market manipulation or trading habits of
| institutions which is the key driver of malicious activity and
| harm in the cryptocurrency space.
| meowface wrote:
| >NOT on market manipulation or trading habits of institutions
| which is the key driver of malicious activity and harm in the
| cryptocurrency space.
|
| How much evidence is there of major institutions acting
| maliciously in the cryptocurrency space, and the scale of the
| impact?
|
| I'm sure there's likely quite a bit of market manipulation from
| some people or entities who hold a lot of cryptocurrency
| assets, but as much as I despise finance and financial
| institutions (of pretty much any kind), I also want to know who
| to hate even more, if applicable.
|
| (Not asking in a rhetorical or contrarian or skeptical way;
| genuinely trying to understand who's accused of what and why.
| And excluding Tether, since we all know the accusations, there,
| and the comment seems to be directed at major US financial
| institutions that were huge long before Bitcoin was created, if
| I understand correctly.)
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| There's no need to invoke conspiracy theories about market
| manipulation. The Senate needed money for this bill, they saw
| that probably a lot of folks with crypto holdings are evading
| taxes, and they wrote this provision to make it easier to
| collect the taxes. It's poorly written, but the clear intent is
| for companies like Coinbase to have to file 1099s so the
| government knows who made how much every year, just like they
| do with conventional stock brokerages.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I agree that the end effect will be largely what you suggest:
| aggregate activity in large institutions at the expense of
| smaller startups and decentralized protocols. But from talking
| to people in the space, it seems that most of the large
| exchanges and hedge funds are vigorously oppose to this law.
| Bryan Armstrong (the CEO of Coinbase) has repeatedly and
| publicly criticized the bill.
|
| I'll cite Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be
| explained by incompetence. I think this is simply the result of
| what happens when we decide our government should be run by a
| bunch of octogenarian lawyers, most of whom's tech knowledge
| ends at their ability to reset their WiFi router. Is it really
| that surprising that Biden, Schumer, Portman, McConnell,
| Yellen, Pelosi, etc. have no understanding about how crypto
| works? They were all born before the charge card was even
| invented.
| qeternity wrote:
| > for manipulation purposes like borrowing for shorting
|
| I see this repeated a lot and I'm still not entirely clear why
| people feel this way. Most major markets in the world have
| futures/borrow mechanisms, and one of the key reasons is that
| it allows shorting.
|
| Short selling is a critical element to any healthy market, and
| we've seen time and time again that markets without well
| functioning short selling are far more vulnerable than those
| with (i.e. real estate).
|
| For instance, let's presume that crypto takes off, and business
| start accepting crypto for contractual obligations. If my
| future costs are in fiat, but future revenues are in crypto, I
| have a big mismatch with a very risky asset. A futures market
| (or shorting) allows me to hedge that risk out and protect
| myself against future volatility. I can lock in my fiat today,
| to ensure that I can cover my future costs. Without such a
| mechanism, I might not be able to risk a collapse in crypto
| markets.
|
| Mature features (like borrows/futures) in crypto markets should
| _aid_ in adoption.
| prepend wrote:
| I think the issue isn't that shorting and other functions
| exist, but that these aren't carried out by most retail
| investors. So frequently financial firms will benefit on this
| functionality using the base accounts of their customers.
|
| So the introduction of this intermediation creates value
| possibility for large firms away from individuals.
| second--shift wrote:
| any US resident with a pulse and a SSN can open an account
| with Interactive Brokers and trade /BTC futures.
|
| Just because they don't doesn't mean they can't.
| qeternity wrote:
| Shorting is available to pretty much everyone now,
| especially with Robinhood et al and easy access to options
| markets (of course most people don't understand vol and
| probably shouldn't trade options). But it's been easy to
| short even on the legacy brokers for as long as I can
| remember (a decade plus).
|
| The issue with shorting is that you have theoretically
| unlimited downside which means greater risk and familiarity
| with concepts like margining. That is often outside the
| grasp of the average retail investor.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| You all cheered when they silenced orange man bad..what did
| expect would happen next?
| null0pointer wrote:
| This particular instance is a disaster, no doubt, but the real
| issue is the bundling of completely unrelated provisions into
| single bills. It's absurd.
| Havoc wrote:
| Not only is it absurd it seems to be a core part of how these
| bill get negotiated cross party
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Welcome to modern American government. We've failed to create a
| system that allows for small, frequent changes to the law, so
| now we have giant ones.
| parineum wrote:
| This is a symptom of a symptom of a symptom.
|
| Congress, essentially, only passes one bill a year now, the
| budget. That's the case because everything else requires 60
| votes because of the filibuster rules. Filibuster rules were
| changed because Obama wanted the affordable care act. Standing
| in the way of that was the Tea Party, the group of Republicans
| that don't negotiate.
|
| I'm going to both sides this one because we now have the
| counterpart to that on the left with the progressives.
|
| There exists a segment of both parties that refuse to negotiate
| from their ideologies. This makes sure that neither party is
| capable of passing legislation unless they have a super
| majority not including that wing of the party.
|
| The infrastructure bill is one of the very few things that can
| break this because the centrists of both parties do actually
| like it quite a bit, they just have to dog and pony hating each
| other before they get it done.
|
| That and war. We can all agree on war.
| legutierr wrote:
| > Filibuster rules were changed because Obama wanted the
| affordable care act.
|
| This is not true. No filibuster rules were changed to
| accommodate the ACA. You might be confused because prt of the
| ACA was passed under reconciliation, a long-existing
| exception to the filibuster rules that allows spending and
| taxation laws to be passed without requiring a supermajority
| to invoke cloture. Reconciliation has been part of the Senate
| rules since 1974.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_.
| ..
| parineum wrote:
| You're right. I was confusing that with the "nuclear
| option" for confirming SC judges that happened under Obama
| as well.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > There exists a segment of both parties that refuse to
| negotiate from their ideologies. This makes sure that neither
| party is capable of passing legislation unless they have a
| super majority not including that wing of the party.
|
| And there is a root cause at the bottom of all this
| dysfunctionality: FPTP voting and gerrymandering that always
| converges into a two-party system with most districts being
| "solid red" or "solid blue", leaving only a handful of
| (highly contested) "swing states/districts" to squabble over.
| asdff wrote:
| Does it matter if there are X number of parties if you
| still end up with multitudes of DINOs and RINOs, etc? I
| will say that the right seems to be ideologically in lock
| step, with the lower tier members thoroughly whipped by
| their commanders in the party. In many ways I'm jealous of
| that efficiency, if only it were aligned to my economic
| interests.
|
| In the democratic party on the other hand, there is a range
| of ideologies. It's not the left party, its the centrist to
| the left party. Joe Manchin is no progressive but he wears
| the D. This is especially apparent in California state and
| local politics, where the majority of politicians are
| democrats but you don't see progress in actual progressive
| initiatives, like housing or transport or homeless services
| and mental health treatment initiatives. Most of the
| democrats in California state and local offices really
| aren't that progressive, and pander to a base with socially
| progressive but economically conservative tenancies (the
| classic NIMBY). For example, it's widely popular to
| publicly speak out against racism, but if you attempt to do
| something about it like change the racist zoning ordinances
| that are still pervasive in your city, you will probably
| destroy your political career in the process and see
| yourself replaced by a DINO.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| >Does it matter if there are X number of parties if you
| still end up with multitudes of DINOs and RINOs, etc?
|
| In Europe, over the last decades our equivalents to the
| Democrats (mostly, Social Democrat parties) and
| Republicans (Christian Democrat/centrist parties) shrank
| in percentages and the political field widened. These
| days, you have in most countries everything on the
| spectrum: communist/tankies, democratic socialists,
| social democrats, christian democrat/centrists, free-
| market liberals, center-right, nationalist/far-right and
| (in some countries) outright fascist/neo-Nazi parties for
| the "mainstream" political orientation plus a host of
| special-issue parties - most notably Greens which have
| become mainstream in itself, national ethnic
| minority/indigenous representation parties, Pirate
| Parties, pan-european liberals, local voter
| associations/"Freie Wahler".
|
| And all of these are to some degree viable, with voters
| flocking to whomever they want to support. Of course,
| coalition forming can be tedious ( _cough_ Netherlands,
| Israel), but it is actual representative democracy at
| work!
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| It's a provision intended to raise the funds for infrastructure
| investments, so it is arguably connected to the bulk of the
| bill.
|
| Besides, mixing different topics is the only way anything can
| every be done: If you have a single issue you're fighting over
| with someone, zero-sum style, the best possible advice is to
| included something unrelated in the discussion, hoping that
| your interests differ in such a way that you can make trades
| beneficial to both parties.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| To fix would take some interesting work.
|
| My dumb idea is 'must fit on no more than 5 standard sheets of
| 8x11 piece of paper'. With exceptions to that needing a 75%
| majority.
|
| My other dumb idea is about 4 people mostly control the vote.
| Majority/minority leader should be a rotating position. With
| the name drawn out of a hat.
| lobochrome wrote:
| Not talking about the specific implementation but the question
| is: Privacy for whom?
|
| Do we need the ,,innovation" of untraceable money?
|
| For instance, we decided to get rid of untraceable cell phone
| numbers (at least in Germany you can't get a cell without ID) and
| - nothing changed for the worse, but arguably some things changed
| for the better.
|
| Why would we introduce that for money/payment flows?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>Do we need the ,,innovation" of untraceable money?
|
| Yes. We need untraceable money. Controlling how people use
| money is tantamount to controlling all of their economic
| interactions. Surveilling how people use their money means
| becoming privy to their most intimate interactions. This is
| mass-surveillance, of everything (because money touches
| everything), being snuck through the backdoor.
|
| With the transition from physical to digital currencies, we've
| created surveillance systems the likes of which the world has
| never seen. The information collection being done on the
| population is being done by a tiny proportion of the
| population, and disproportionately benefiting the political
| elite. Hyper-centralization exacerbates income and power
| disparities, and I would bet any money it leads to a more
| fragile social order.
|
| https://twitter.com/SpencerKSchiff/status/125276128577685913...
|
| >>In the last 20 years of available data, real median household
| income of Washington, D.C.'s residents has increased by 66.11%.
| For the entire country, the 20-yr increase is only 5.23%. This
| trend of widening disparity has accelerated dramatically since
| the Great Recession's onset.
|
| We need the more distributed configuration of power that
| historically existed, and that can only happen if the privacy
| that is characteristic of physical currencies is imparted upon
| digital currencies.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Untraceable money is far more likely to lead to
| centralization of power, because it allows the already
| wealthy to act unaccountably.
|
| >>In the last 20 years of available data, real median
| household income of Washington, D.C.'s residents has
| increased by 66.11%. For the entire country, the 20-yr
| increase is only 5.23%.
|
| With untraceable money you'd never know this. Or you'd have
| to limit yourself to "declared income", which would be
| effectively voluntary.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Where do you think they got that money from in the first
| place?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>Untraceable money is far more likely to lead to
| centralization of power, because it allows the already
| wealthy to act unaccountably.
|
| How do you keep the people collecting all of this
| information accountable? Information asymmetries that this
| kind of mass-surveillance creates ultimately leads to power
| disparities, and there is no way to police the information
| collectors to prevent them from profiting off of it.
|
| Just look at the Snowden revelations. He speaks of LOVEINT,
| where agents would on intimate partners. It was a practice
| so common it had its own term coined for it. This is just
| the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea how this
| information is being used, and how it's contributing to all
| sorts of social, economic and political disparities.
|
| And unlike the business world, where individuals begin to
| face diseconomies of scale as the size of their portolio of
| businesses/investments grows beyond their ability to
| actively manage them, and the number of investment targets
| that can absorb their wealth diminishes [1], growing
| concentrations of political power begets even more
| political power, as the state's monopoly on violence
| requires no sophistication to scale up.
|
| >>With untraceable money you'd never know this. Or you'd
| have to limit yourself to "declared income", which would be
| effectively voluntary.
|
| Untraceable money does not mean an income tax can't be
| collected. The act of earning income doesn't become
| untraceable by virtue of the government not being able to
| swoop in and monitor every transaction without a warrant.
| And frankly, if an income tax did require warrantless mass-
| surveillance of the population's financial interactions, to
| effectively collect, then it would be better to replace it
| with another form of taxation which didn't.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/2Qq8GZjmHqw?t=120
| aww_dang wrote:
| You observe that the political class benefits
| disproportionately from their political power. Next you
| conclude the solution is to grant them more power via
| regulation.
| ben_w wrote:
| I would assert the already powerful gain more power from
| the absence of regulation; forcing them to set rules --
| imperfect a process as that is -- is less bad than
| anarchy, which seems to often degenerate into handing all
| the power very quickly to the worst people.
| aww_dang wrote:
| "We can't allow more freedom, because that would lead to
| oppression"
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not "free" to go on a machine gun rampage, this lack
| of freedom _isn't_ "being oppressed", and as it applies
| to everyone it stops other people doing it to me.
|
| So I know you're being sarcastic, but yes, for some
| things more freedom directly causes oppression.
|
| I assert that letting power-hungry tax evaders get away
| with it is in that category.
| jl2718 wrote:
| > power-hungry tax evaders
|
| You mean like the owners of all of the biggest companies
| in the world right now?
|
| Or do you mean like that guy that did absolutely nothing
| except buy some dog coins and then tried to disappear to
| go live on a beach somewhere?
| ben_w wrote:
| Like most, I find the former are the ones who most
| wrankle, but I don't actually know which is worse. I have
| heard that one of Greece's big economic problems is too
| many ordinary people think tax is for suckers (and absent
| full automation we can't _all_ live on a beach, sale of
| doge or otherwise). I don't even know if that's an
| accurate depiction of Greece, but it's certainly
| compatible with human nature, and the tragedy of the
| commons comes in many forms.
| aww_dang wrote:
| I'll allow that my characterization was mildly
| hyperbolic. However there's some truth there. You're
| stretching when you compare people voluntarily consuming
| products or services with violence. If this is the
| comparison you need to make, I think it is illustrative
| of where the argument is going. The clincher is that
| regulations, taxes or outright prohibitions of
| cryptocurrencies will be enforced with violence.
|
| More directly, if some _villainous_ _entrepreneur_
| manages to protect his wealth from government
| confiscation, that is freedom. Confiscation under the
| threat of violence can hardly be construed as "freedom".
|
| Consider the origins of freedom. Are freedoms granted by
| government? Where does it stem from? Who is entitled to
| the value you add to a marketplace? Is a market a zero
| sum game?
| ben_w wrote:
| > The clincher is that regulations, taxes or outright
| prohibitions of cryptocurrencies will be enforced with
| violence.
|
| Hence my references to anarchy. All governments are the
| definers of legitimate force and to whom their local
| monopoly of it can be deputised.
|
| > Are freedoms granted by government?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Where does it stem from?
|
| Game theory, economics, and the occasional threat of
| other people doing violence against the stuff they (the
| powerful) like.
|
| > Who is entitled to the value you add to a marketplace?
|
| Nobody, including the creator of that value. The creators
| of value are only rewarded with it because a system
| vastly bigger than any single human has temporarily
| settled on a local equilibrium where that is the
| motivation.
|
| Entitlements only exists with respect to legal frameworks
| and with enforcement mechanisms, not by themselves.
|
| > Is a market a zero sum game?
|
| They can be, they can also be negative or positive sum
| games. Messing with currencies is often a negative,
| because it creates opportunities to defect that otherwise
| don't exist.
|
| I own a flat. It's collecting rent. If the economy goes
| up and all else is equal, I collect more rent (more money
| in the system for fixed supply); if home construction
| increases, I collect less (more supply for fixed money in
| the system). This income is _entirely_ due to what the
| government in charge of the area decides to motivate, not
| how much I put into maintaining the place. Similarly: the
| profitability of Nissan in the UK is determined by what
| sort of trade deal the UK and the EU have; Facebook,
| GDPR-style and safe harbour laws; SpaceX, national
| security laws; Saudi Aramco, global oil policy; and so
| on.
|
| None of us stands alone (assuming nobody here has a von
| Neumann probe), and tax evasion is Nash-defection.
| lobochrome wrote:
| Has money ever been untraceable? Cash certainly was traceable
| starting with certain volume. Closest was maybe art and
| collectibles during Shoa!?
|
| A more fragile social order then we have today?!
| htlbx wrote:
| This is what you wanted democrats.
|
| You people are pure fucking evil.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Since when was a public ledger of financial transactions anything
| but a privacy disaster?
| chrisan wrote:
| how do I tie this public ledger to an individual?
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I'm tired of having to care about digital currencies and I really
| don't care if the people working with them get treated unfairly.
| It's a solution in search of a problem and I'm tired of people
| who otherwise don't know shit about technology constantly asking
| me about it.
|
| Digital currencies have solved none of our social problems, and
| will never solve any of our social problems. Instead they're just
| a giant distraction, or worse a not so clever means of
| facilitating sophmoric scams on the ignorant.
| mypastself wrote:
| Even if you think they're criminals, why wouldn't you want them
| to get treated fairly? What other types of crimes do you think
| deserve unfair treatment?
| asah wrote:
| Yeah me too. And deep neural nets. And quantum computing. And
| 4k TV. And smart phones. And drones. Cause nuthin but trouble.
| Give me my horse and buggy !
|
| /s
|
| Seriously, it's both pointless to play Luddite (in general) and
| there's plenty of legit and exciting applications for crypto,
| from wildly faster and easier capital allocation to
| sophisticated artistic rights contracts replacing junky and
| expensive legal contracts.
| infinitezest wrote:
| I think this is a pretty reductionist argument. Just like the
| other technologies that you mentioned crypto has some good
| applications. But it really comes down to a cost-benefit
| analysis. Easier said than done, sure, but I'm not at all
| convinced by the "oh well I guess you think ALL tech is bad
| then" argument.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I would add to this that they created more problems than
| solved. Negative environmental impact, criminal activities,
| robbery of unqualified investors -- all that for a few geeks to
| have a false feeling of privacy.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| How could you not care if people are treated unfairly? This is
| not a good baseline value that we can all share. Are we all
| going to hope that other people, who disagree with us on some
| social or business issue, are treated unfairly? Is politics
| going to be relegated to a forum to wage a never-ending battle
| against each other?
|
| How about live and let live?
| aww_dang wrote:
| Apparently for many here, subjective interpretations of
| "social good" trump the basic premises of voluntary
| interactions and natural law. Contrast those views with
| decentralized and non-violent valuations provided by
| voluntary consumption.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| I mean, I don't think it advances my understanding of the
| "social good" for people to consume billions of dollars of
| pop-culture entertainment in the form of the Kardashians,
| Youtube reality-TV celebrities etc, but in no semblance of
| a free society do I express that preference through
| punitive government measures against the people expending
| their resources on that.
| aww_dang wrote:
| By allowing a decentralized market based system to
| ascribe value to these things we avoid the problem of
| imposing our subjective value judgments on others. It may
| not be perfect, but it is more humane and productive than
| central planning.
|
| Imagine the democratic alternative, where the masses vote
| that watching the Kardashians is compulsory. Or that your
| own niche interests are prohibited.
| jl2718 wrote:
| What are some of the social problems that the SWIFT network
| solves?
| bawana wrote:
| so is tax avoidance the real benefit in transacting with crypto?
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| A very good point was mentioned here, the miners. Is it possible
| to ID miners? Are they subject to kyc and taxes? I mean , they
| are generating revenue and distributing/creating assets. Upon
| mining, how long is the mined coin anonymous?
| dylkil wrote:
| Anyone can buy an asic and turn it on to start mining. The
| mined coin stays anon as long as the miner has good opsec.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Can he simply convert it to cash via local Bitcoin?
|
| Another thing I wonder, is having an ASIC a guarantee to mine
| something? I mean new coins/partial coins, not transaction
| processing.
| dylkil wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to convert to cash anon
|
| Most miners join pools. A single asic will never mine a
| block, so miners pool hashpower together and you get paid
| out your share of the hashpower.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| thanks, curious to hear about the Anom ways of conversion
| and do they get paid in fiat or Satoshi s typically?
| rvz wrote:
| It's like they want to push everyone to use privacy coins at this
| point.
|
| Even if this passes succeeds, it helps the privacy coins anyway.
| Just wait until the BTC maximalists realise that BTC is traceable
| and not private.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| This is more than a privacy disaster. It is so far so vaguely
| worded (maybe deliberately?) that the government can target
| everyone in the ecosystem with penalties:
|
| While the language is still evolving, the proposal would seek to
| expand the definition of "broker" under section 6045(c)(1) of the
| Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to include anyone who is
| "responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating
| transfers of digital assets" on behalf of another person. These
| newly defined brokers would be required to comply with IRS
| reporting requirements for brokers, including filing form 1099s
| with the IRS. That means they would have to collect user data,
| including users' names and addresses.
|
| The broad, confusing language leaves open a door for almost any
| entity within the cryptocurrency ecosystem to be considered a
| "broker"--including software developers and cryptocurrency
| startups that aren't custodying or controlling assets on behalf
| of their users. It could even potentially implicate miners, those
| who confirm and verify blockchain transactions. The mandate to
| collect names, addresses, and transactions of customers means
| almost every company even tangentially related to cryptocurrency
| may suddenly be forced to surveil their users.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >It is so far so vaguely worded (maybe deliberately?) that the
| government can target everyone in the ecosystem with penalties:
|
| That's the point. They reserve the power of arbitrary
| enforcement early on because they don't know what the stuff
| they won't like will look like. So then they'll go after
| anything they don't like and leave it up to the courts and the
| legislature to clean up the mess.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of
| digital assets_
|
| I fail to see how this is a "privacy disaster." It looks like
| crypto brokers are going to be treated like all other
| brokerages.
|
| Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank account
| requires your name and address so they can report interest
| payments to the government? Or when
| Robinhood/Schwab/Vanguard/Etc send the IRS a list of all your
| stock transactions for the year in a form 1099?
|
| Bitcoin is basically digital gold, and just like with gold,
| when you chose to buy or sell it the convenient way (eg.
| through an ETF instead of actual physical gold), it gets
| reported to everybody.
|
| You can always custody your own bitcoin and find partners to
| transact with directly and choose not to report it (like with
| physical gold), but, similar to physical gold, it will be
| extremely cumbersome, risky, and not worth your time to do so.
| miracle2k wrote:
| The argument is that software developers or miners should not
| be treated as brokers, the later being akin to ISPs. If you
| are not going to engage with this argument, why bother?
| pembrook wrote:
| Why argue against something that isn't actually in the
| legislation and is intended to scare people?
|
| Sure, if you bend over backwards and squint through one
| eye, you can contort yourself into the bad faith
| interpretation that developers will be treated as brokers--
| given they can engage in "transfers."
|
| But just because some entity can be considered to exist on
| the same "continuum" as crypto brokers, doesn't mean there
| isn't a clear division between them:
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy
|
| One could also contort themselves into the assertion that
| convenience stores engage in transfers with "digital
| assets" (shifting credit via digitally created loans
| provided by Visa).
|
| Maybe I should publish an article saying this legislation
| will require 7-Eleven to report to the government every
| time you buy a twinkie? That'll really get some clicks!
| echopurity wrote:
| There is no "good faith" when violence is involved.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| If this part is true
|
| > the proposal would seek to expand the definition of
| "broker" under section 6045(c)(1) of the Internal Revenue
| Code of 1986 to include anyone who is "responsible for
| and regularly providing any service effectuating
| transfers of digital assets"
|
| Then this appears to be false
|
| > something that isn't actually in the legislation
|
| Because "digital asset" is extremely broad and can easily
| be seen to cover things like video game inventory items.
|
| Is there a specific and detailed definition of "video
| asset" in the legislation?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Because "digital asset" is extremely broad and can
| easily be seen to cover things like video game inventory
| items_
|
| I believe digital asset is a defined term in this
| legislation, though the quote doesn't show any
| capitalisation.
| cptskippy wrote:
| That's the trouble with armchair legislation, no one
| bothers to read the text in full or understand the rules
| of the game. Most legislation has a dictionary to define
| the terms use within.
|
| These definitions are critical and updates to modify a
| definition without modifying the text can still have
| dramatic affect.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| See page 2435. Digital asset is defined as a digital
| representation of value recorded on a cryptographically
| distributed ledger or any similar technology.
|
| Practically, the Secretary and the courts will decide
| what this means.
|
| If you're using in-game tokens to represent value and
| maintain a ledger, then sure, that could count. Which is
| good. why should it be possible to sidestep this law by
| creating a coin that is liquid and fungible and has etfs
| that track it but just happens to be used for in game
| purchases? That would be a silly and absurd loophole.
|
| If your in game currency is one-way, ie can't be
| converted back to USD or any other assets, then it's by
| (legal) definition not representation of value.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > but just happens to be used for in game purchases
|
| Because if I make a game where items drop, and players
| can transfer items between each other, but not convert
| any of it to real world money... then making the system,
| or possibly every single player, be responsible for
| reporting all activity and participants to the government
| is... to be blunt, bat-shit crazy?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| That would not be a representation of value. I address
| literally exactly this scenario in my comment.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| If it is possible to sell in-game items for out of game
| money (either using in game processes or an external
| system like a 3rd party site), then would this mean they
| are "value". If so, does that mean each player that sells
| items needs to report every transaction? Or that the game
| system needs to report every in game transaction
| (transfer of items from one character to another). And
| that reporting needs to include real life information
| about the players involved?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Players already have to report substantial real gains on
| sales of game assets. If you've been doing this and not
| reporting income, especially if it's beyond trivial sums
| (eg like 5 figures or so), talk with your accountant
| ASAP.
|
| Beyond that, it depends, but the answer definitely isn't
| "no". That's true even today, btw: game companies can't
| knowingly allow money laundering through their in game
| currency, for example, and gambling laws almost always
| apply if you can cash out and the game contains any type
| of chance component (eg loot boxes).
|
| Basically, if your game is setup in a way that could be
| trivially used for transferring real world assets between
| players, even existing regulations probably already
| apply. This is one of many reasons most games only
| support one way transactions -- you can move money into
| the game but not back out (at least without breaking tos)
|
| "X but in a video game" is almost always actually really
| X when it comes to money and other assets that can flow
| into and out of the game easily. A VR Wells Fargo branch
| is still a bank.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > Sure, if you bend over backwards and squint through one
| eye, you can contort yourself into the bad faith
| interpretation that developers will be treated as brokers
| --given they can engage in "transfers."
|
| Pardon me for having a legal education and knowing that
| prosecutors are often more than willing to bend over
| backwards and squint through one eye.
|
| If it's possible for a prosecutor to argue it, they will
| eventually argue it, and most of the time the courts
| won't push back.
| SamPatt wrote:
| The entire history of governance and prosecution is bad
| faith arguments.
|
| They only need the thinnest veneer of legality in order
| to abuse their power.
| zionic wrote:
| >Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank
| account requires your name and address so they can report
| interest payments to the government?
|
| Yes. Do you not? They have no right to that information. Why
| do so many in the "hacker" culture simp for the authority
| structure?
| capableweb wrote:
| Be careful to attribute what you read on Hacker News to the
| entire "hacker culture". There are so many strongly held
| opinions I've never heard hackers say out loud in real
| life, most famous example must be about unions. I've heard
| zero hackers arguing that unions are bad in real life,
| while when the discussion comes up on Hacker News, the
| discussions seems to lean 50/50 on if unions are actually
| good or bad.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Never knew any cypherpunk or cypherpunk-adjacent people,
| then?
| pksebben wrote:
| I'm sure that isn't in any way Pinkerton astroturfing.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Hi. I started hacking in 3rd grade in Apple Basic on an
| Apple IIe, published dozens of CVEs in my youth, helped
| start a hackerspace, build sota robots, etc etc etc.
|
| Pretty sure I get to call myself a hacker in any sense of
| that word.
|
| I'm a fan of KYC and paying taxes precisely because I'm a
| hacker and can immediately see how easy it is to hack civil
| society without those things.
|
| Also, this isn't a forum for hackers in any definition of
| the word. It's a public discussion forum run by and often
| for the benefit of a powerful and rich VC firm with
| substantial investments in alt fin tech speculation. are
| you sure you're not the one simping?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Most folks here arguing that banking laws are also a
| privacy disaster _only_ because of the proposed law. I 'm
| not saying they were ok with it earlier and changing
| their stance now. Just that, they simply had no stance
| earlier and accepted the status quo.
|
| (Personally, I think the wording has to be tightened. My
| only stance is crypto should be on-par with other banking
| laws. No special treatment. Crypto should (hopefully)
| succeed but shouldn't become a refuge for money
| laundering, facilitation of crimes and other less than
| desirable activities. It could lead to long term harm for
| the ecosystem than adding KYC and making it mainstream.)
| knorker wrote:
| If you don't believe that the government has the right to
| make laws, then that's one argument.
|
| If you don't believe that the government should be allowed
| to attempt to tackle money laundering, that such crime is
| simply to be shielded at all cost from being reduced, then
| that's another.
|
| So the question is "what do you want?".
|
| And the cryptocurrency community has been completely unable
| to present anything that isn't literal anarchy or
| feudalism. And guess what, nobody will be able to sell
| anarchy or feudalism to the general public, or even outside
| a very very small community.
|
| This other comment said it better:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047145
| barnabee wrote:
| > Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank
| account requires your name and address so they can report
| interest payments to the government? Or when
| Robinhood/Schwab/Vanguard/Etc send the IRS a list of all your
| stock transactions for the year in a form 1099?
|
| Yes. Clearly.
|
| My car doesn't keep an up to date record of my name and
| adress so it can report my position and speed to the
| authorities. Warrantless wiretapping is illegal in most
| (every?) form outside finance, and there's no justification
| for banks or investment firms being any different.
|
| Governments have a right to make laws, they don't have a
| right to continuously monitor every citizen to enforce them.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank
| account requires your name and address so they can report
| interest payments to the government?
|
| Yes.
| bgitarts wrote:
| Yes I call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank account
| requires your name and address so they can report interest
| payments to the government. Or when
| Robinhood/Schwab/Vanguard/Etc send the IRS a list of all your
| stock transactions for the year in a form 1099.
| adolph wrote:
| Is it accurate to treat crypto facilities as equity brokers,
| or more like foreign currency exchanges? (Forex probably have
| their own reporting requirements, the question is about
| analogous service, not the reporting/privacy part.)
| pembrook wrote:
| You probably don't want crypto transactions to be taxed
| like forex ones--unless you enjoy paying capital gains
| taxes before you've even sold: https://www.investopedia.com
| /terms/s/section-1256-contract.a...
| dcolkitt wrote:
| You're confused. Section 1256 applies to _futures_ , not
| forex. Spot forex positions are taxed as ordinary capital
| gains under Section 988. Under very specific conditions a
| high-volume spot forex trader who never takes deliver
| _may elect_ to be taxed under 1256, but that 's
| completely optional.
|
| https://greentradertax.com/a-case-for-retail-forex-
| traders-u...
| Communitivity wrote:
| > Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank
| account requires your name and address so they can report
| interest payments to the government? Or when
| Robinhood/Schwab/Vanguard/Etc send the IRS a list of all your
| stock transactions for the year in a form 1099?
|
| Yes, I do. The IRS has slowly gathered power since 1913.
| Federal taxes were supposed to be short term and temporary,
| for war levies and such.
|
| Furthermore, the tax code within the constitution controverts
| itself: "all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform
| throughout the United States" - I.8.1
| api wrote:
| I also must throw in the fact that IRS enforcement is
| disproportionately against "regular" people. The IRS
| doesn't go after enormous tax dodging billionaires very
| often, because going after some small business owner who
| mis-reported something or is trying to squeak something by
| is a better way to make quota.
|
| It results in yet another area where "laws are for little
| people."
| [deleted]
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank
| account requires your name and address so they can report
| interest payments to the government? Or when
| Robinhood/Schwab/Vanguard/Etc send the IRS a list of all your
| stock transactions for the year in a form 1099?
|
| This isn't like that at all. This would be like the
| government requiring Microsoft to KYC every single user of
| Excel, because people use their software to manage money.
| knorker wrote:
| No it's not. Not at all.
| asdff wrote:
| Not really, since excel can be used for everything from
| budgeting to making a list of your favorite movies.
| Cryptocurrency is for transactions and speculation, not
| much different than any other financial product when you
| shuck off the technical mumbo jumbo surrounding it. Why
| would that not be regulated?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Except it's not, if you look at the broader Ethereum &
| smart contract ecosystem. It's also for decentralized
| organizations (Aragon), incentivizing distributed storage
| (Filecoin/IPFS), pricing ad markets (Brave/BAT), supply
| chain management (VeChain), managing ownership (NFTs),
| and project governance and voting (many tokens).
|
| This is like saying "The Internet is for porn" because
| that's your only exposure to it. Yes, it's the most
| common early use - but it's very far from the _only_ use.
| 8note wrote:
| Those things should be split out then, so there isn't a
| coin attached to it.
|
| If you couple things badly, you can end up with more
| responsibilities than you want
| nostrademons wrote:
| There has to be a coin attached to it because that is how
| you incentivize actors within the ecosystem to take
| certain actions (eg. "share their hard disk space" for
| FileCoin or "view ads" for BAT).
|
| The central premise of these projects is that humans make
| terrible decisions, markets make good decisions, so let's
| replace humans with markets whenever possible. Right now,
| some exec at Google determines how many ads you see on
| the Internet. The premise of Brave & BAT is that _you_
| decide whether you want to see ads on the Internet, you
| get compensated for viewing them, and if enough people
| decide the ads are not worth their time, they 'll turn
| them off and drive the price of BAT up enough that people
| _do_ want to view them.
|
| Right now, some exec at Amazon decides how much you pay
| for S3. The premise of FileCoin & IPFS is that lots of
| ordinary home users have spare hard drive space, and they
| should be able to be compensated for renting out that
| space to projects that need lots of distributed storage.
| The market price of FileCoin is that which equilibrates
| demand for storage with supply.
| 8note wrote:
| The requirement is compensation. You could just pay them
| through PayPal. There's no need to have them do a stock
| trade for somebody else in order for you to pay them for
| S3 space.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Okay. How about companies that create book keeping
| software? Should they be required to KYC their customers.
| superlopuh wrote:
| "digital assets" includes more than cryptocurrency
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > Do you also call it a "privacy disaster" when your bank
| account requires your name and address so they can report
| interest payments to the government? Or when
| Robinhood/Schwab/Vanguard/Etc send the IRS a list of all your
| stock transactions for the year in a form 1099?
|
| "Disaster" is a loaded word, but _of course_ it would be a
| huge privacy improvement if they didn 't!
| pjc50 wrote:
| This should be read along with
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28042185 "Wealthy
| Americans Targeted by U.S. in Panama Tax-Fraud Probe". The
| fundamental question is "should paying tax be optional for rich
| people?" Large parts of the crypto ecosystem believe that the
| answer should be "yes". The US government believes the answer
| should be "no".
| fallingknife wrote:
| Only if the government continues to insist on taxing income
| as a main source of income. The government could easily
| implement a sales tax and crypto would only be a small
| obstacle to enforcement. And as a bonus feature we could fire
| a bunch of bureaucrats too.
| adrianN wrote:
| I don't think this would be a good idea for fairness
| reasons, but assuming you'd implement it this way: How
| would you collect sales tax if you allow completely
| anonymous transactions? This is already a problem with
| cash, it would become a bigger problem if you introduce
| more convenient alternatives to cash in the form of crypto.
| NickM wrote:
| It could be done anonymously if you calculate purchases
| implicitly as income minus savings. This would de-
| anonymize savings of course, but they're not really that
| anonymous right now anyway since most methods of savings
| have to report interest/dividends/etc.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And then you're back to where you started, surely? You
| still need the information about income.
| NickM wrote:
| Right, but the problem cited earlier up in the thread is
| that sales tax would prevent anonymous purchases; if you
| accept that income is not anonymous (which it already
| isn't), then you can still have a system with both sales
| tax and anonymous purchases.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Income: unknown due to financial privacy
|
| Savings: unknown (held in cryptocurrency, private)
|
| Tax: divide by zero error
|
| Besides, doesn't the US already have sales taxes? Or are
| they state-only? I'm starting to favor a tax on real
| estate and/or land value, since that's physically
| impossible to hide.
| handrous wrote:
| > Besides, doesn't the US already have sales taxes? Or
| are they state-only?
|
| State. City. County. Sub-divisions of same that are
| special sales tax districts and have extra sales tax
| applied. Not every instance of those entities applies a
| sales tax, but any _could_ and many do. Basically
| everything _except_ federal. The sales tax where I am, in
| a "red" state, is about 11% (we actually have a _really_
| high effective all-inclusive tax rate in this state, for
| how entirely shitty government services and
| infrastructure are)
|
| > I'm starting to favor a tax on real estate and/or land
| value, since that's physically impossible to hide.
|
| The challenge with that is the system for assigning value
| --everything else about it is easy. We already have
| something close to what you'd need in the US because real
| estate property taxes are common. That system's not
| perfect but it may still be good-enough, despite its
| flaws. It seems to work kinda OK. That might change if
| that became a more important revenue source, and for more
| levels of government, though.
| nightski wrote:
| It's a lot easier to require businesses in the country to
| report sales tax (of which the infrastructure is already
| in place and could be funded more heavily) than it is to
| go after individuals. Even if the business' individual
| transactions are in cash or anonymous.
|
| There will always be a black market, but eventually that
| money has to flow back into the regular economy (food,
| housing, etc...) and will be taxed.
| ajackfox wrote:
| Sales taxes are regressive and affect the poorest the most.
| Income taxes (can be) progressive.
|
| Progressive taxation benefits society at large.
| NickM wrote:
| Sales taxes can be done in a progressive way if you
| calculate total purchases for the year as (reported
| income minus reported money added to savings).
|
| Though, of course, you then need even more reporting than
| we already have, but it would have the upside of no
| longer disincentivizing work like the current system
| does, and rewarding savings over spending too.
| NickM wrote:
| Not sure why I got downvoted; while it's not super well-
| known, this is a real and potentially feasible idea that
| has been studied by economists and has had papers written
| about it. You can absolutely apply tax brackets to sales
| tax to avoid making it a regressive tax, it's just a
| little bit more administratively complex.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| There are a number of reasons for your downvotes. For
| starters, income taxes don't disincentive work and are in
| fact lower now than they were during our greatest periods
| of economic growth.
|
| And from the perspective of someone who actually works in
| tax: the "FairTax" simply pushes all the complexity to
| everyday transactions, instead of minimizing it to
| periodic transactions occurring 1-2 times a month (with
| reporting once a year). It would hugely disincentive
| paying for actual things, and artificially incentivize
| (untaxed) services over (heavily taxed) goods.
|
| Moreover, the "FairTax" rate would be _30%_ or more on
| all purchases. Not only would the FairTax would obscenely
| regressive in effect, but a tax rate that large would
| push a substantial portion of the economy underground!
|
| There's so much wrong with "FairTax" that it should be
| called "Ridiculous Tax."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > income taxes don't disincentive work
|
| While I agree with much of your post, current taxes on
| income (featuring reduced taxes on capital income,
| exclusion of most income from gifts/inheritances, and
| supplemental taxes on labor income ["payroll tax"])
| absolutely disincentivize working for income if you have
| choices of how to get income. Now, lots of people don't
| have choices and are stuck with work, but that doesn't
| mean there is no disincentive effect.
|
| (Of course, "treat income as income" makes this much
| fairer than the status quo, much less the laughably
| misnamed "FairTax".)
| gamblor956 wrote:
| All of those alternative sources of money require an
| individual to already be quite wealthy: capital income
| means capital assets; gifts/inheritances means wealthy
| family. At that point...it honestly doesn't matter how
| you get your money. Over my career I have provided tax
| consulting and compliance services to many HNW
| individuals, and income taxes were never once a
| disincentive to working. A person rich enough to choose
| how they earn their income works because they choose to.
|
| (Note: payroll taxes such as FICA, etc., actually phase
| out pretty quickly after $100k in earnings, so they're
| regressive in nature. There is the high-wage supplemental
| tax, but this is offset by the cap on income subject to
| SSI tax, so workers earnings more than $140k actually pay
| less in payroll tax.)
|
| That being said, I agree that capital gains should be
| treated as regular income (as it was historically, pre-
| Reagan) and that income received via gift/inheritance
| should not receive a FMV cost basis.
| NickM wrote:
| Right, exactly. And besides the examples you mentioned,
| the differing income tax brackets on married couples is
| also a big example of this. If only one spouse is
| working, and the second spouse is deciding whether to get
| a job, then having all of the second spouse's income
| taxed at a higher marginal rate from the get go can
| easily influence people's decisions.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That is probably different than the incorrect argument
| I've often heard, that "if I get paid more and move into
| a new tax bracket, I'll net less money" which shows up
| when someone doesn't understand the concept of taxation
| on marginal dollars.
|
| I think the people who argue for higher taxes on
| wealthier brackets also argue for capital gains to be
| taxed at a similar/equal rate to income.
| NickM wrote:
| I think you're making some incorrect political
| assumptions about my views. I have no idea what this
| "FairTax" thing is that you're referring to, but that
| sounds like something pretty different from what I'm
| talking about.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Your parent comment described one of the proposed ways
| for implementing the FairTax system, in which a national
| sales tax would replace the national income tax.
|
| Even if you did not mean to suggest FairTax and you mean
| something very different, your proposal still ends up
| being significantly more complicated than an income tax,
| since now taxpayers must track all purchases made over
| the year rather than the relatively limited sources of
| income they have. Your proposal would increase the
| compliance burden on buyers, sellers, _and_ the
| government.
| NickM wrote:
| No, my comment said _calculate total purchases for the
| year as (reported income minus reported money added to
| savings)_ which specifically does _not_ require tracking
| _any_ purchases, only income and contributions to bank
| /investment/retirement accounts and such.
|
| By not tracking purchases individually, and only
| inferring the total amount of money spent by subtracting
| savings from income, you can also apply brackets to
| purchases, and thus avoid the regressive nature of a
| "simple" flat sales tax.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Denmark and Sweden have VAT rates of 25%, so it's not
| nearly as unrealistic as you make it out to be.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I figure you can make them progressive by taxing luxury
| items and not necessities. Obviously there's a ton of
| gray area but it could still help a lot.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Progressive taxation benefits society at large...
|
| ... claim the poor and the people who make their money
| off capital gains.
|
| Who gets to decide what "good for society" means in
| context of taxation is possibly the most political
| question out there. It is not at all obvious that making
| the most productive people pay most of the burden gets to
| the best outcome.
| dnautics wrote:
| the more people's lives you are affecting in a positive
| sense the more likely it is you are making a very high
| income.
|
| the opposite arrow is not necessarily true, but one
| wonders if there isn't a 'baby with the bathwater' effect
| with progressive taxation.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| As OSS dev this very often not true for instance: there
| is a lot of OSS having a positive effect on a huge amount
| of people and yet the authors scraping by. Paying for OSS
| should be a tax write off aka charity. Would stimulate
| more people to just open source it all.
| dnautics wrote:
| You assume that the value in this case is created merely
| by its existence but software in a vacuum is worthless.
| The value in software is also created by orgs that choose
| to use the software, by distribution networks. It must be
| reduced to practice.
|
| As a software dev that can be a hard pill to swallow.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yes, agreed. But does that change the case?
| dnautics wrote:
| Yes? I am asserting that you are overestimating the value
| of the programmer, which is one axis of the correlation I
| suggest.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Being highly paid or at the top of a management structure
| does not equal being more productive.
|
| It _is_ one philosophy that there exists some line, some
| fuzzy DMZ that gets crossed between being merely
| "wealthy and more prosperous than others" and obscene.
| Colloquially that seems to be "billionaire" but I bet a
| lot of people on the farther-left would define is
| somewhere north of $10 million.
|
| Especially in a country so far behind the rest of the
| developed world with regards to access to health-care and
| housing for so many millions of people.
| nightski wrote:
| This is alleviated with a probate and has been studied in
| depth ala the FairTax. It's FUD and is holding us back.
|
| Not to mention there are many efficiencies that come with
| this system which would likely cause prices to even out
| over time near their current levels or just slightly
| higher.
| DennisP wrote:
| Believe it or not it's possible to support tax enforcement,
| and still not want the core functions necessary for
| cryptocurrency to be made illegal.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Is privacy, or specifically the ability to earn income
| while concealing it, a core function?
|
| (It's an unfortunate feature of the weightlessness of
| modern money, crypto or otherwise, that proportionate
| privacy is now hard. In the old days, if you wanted to move
| a lot of money, especially internationally, you had to go
| to a lot of physical trouble:
| https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2019/1204/1096878-poland/
| ; this was hard to hide and easy to intercept. Nowadays you
| could theoretically move billions with a brainwallet. The
| binance cold wallet is twice as much as the Polish wartime
| gold: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-
| addresses....
|
| So we end up with a situation in which in order to track
| the large transactions a system is built which tracks _all_
| transactions.)
| DennisP wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, privacy is not a core
| function of most cryptocurrencies. Every transaction is
| on an open ledger viewable by anyone. If you fund an
| address from a regulated exchange, it's simple for the
| government to know who you are.
|
| Mining _is_ a core function. None of it works without
| that (or staking, which is equivalent). A miner is not
| able to know who you are, since the regulated exchanges
| are not reporting their KYC to all the miners. Making
| miners responsible for sending 1099s would effectively
| make it illegal to run public blockchains.
| WJW wrote:
| A miner _could_ know who you are, though such
| functionality is not implemented in any of the current
| currencies I know of. There is no technical reason that a
| transaction cannot contain a cryptographically signed
| identifier of the sender.
|
| A very rough sketch of such a system:
|
| - Any exchange that wishes to offer crypto services to US
| citizens must do KYC according to the existing
| regulations.
|
| - Those exchanges make available each day a file with all
| the KYC-ed wallet adresses.
|
| - Miners can theoretically choose which transactions to
| include and which to reject, but at the moment the main
| (only?) criterion is how much fees are attached to the
| transaction. You could mandate that they also do a lookup
| into the KYC data and only accept the transaction if the
| sending address is present in the list.
|
| - I could even see the SEC or some other central body
| (perhaps one per country) maintaining such a list,
| exchanges submit their lists and miner can download it.
| This is already done in several other sectors of the
| economy.
| DennisP wrote:
| In that case, every transaction would not only be visible
| to everyone on a public ledger, but come with complete
| identification of all participants. It'd be like having
| your credit card and bank statements posted on a website.
| Any embarrassing purchases would be public, and anyone
| with a large balance would be a target.
|
| And why would you do this? The KYC you're making public
| is already available to the government, and the on-chain
| transactions are already public.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| Paying tax is and will always be optional for the rich.
| Crypto offers the middle class a chance to evade taxes as
| well, so lawmakers are of course far more adversarial to it
| than they are to the methods used by themselves and their
| corporate friends.
|
| One cold hard look at https://usdebtclock.org/ is enough to
| convince me that paying taxes to the US government is not a
| moral imperative. Every penny I pay is going towards paying
| off a massive ever-expanding black hole of debt that is
| mathematically impossible to ever pay off, the government is
| going to spend the same amount regardless of the revenue it
| collects since the Fed just prints it all anyways. So what's
| the point in "paying your fair share" in such a system? You'd
| be a fool not to evade as much as you possibly can.
| flerovium wrote:
| This misses the point: 'loopholes' often require
| sacrificing optionality. Most "X billionaire paid Y in
| taxes" have to do with _deferred_ taxes or charity, which
| can't exactly be spent on lamborghinis.
|
| There are definitely bad tactics and real loopholes, but
| this isn't the main problem. The real problems are more
| subtle and they require trade-offs.
|
| These problems won't be solved as long as the tax code
| remains as complex as it is.
|
| Massive tax regulation is a surprisingly recent
| invention.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/17/roy-
| blunt/...
|
| EDIT: the parent author's very strongly worded statement
| isn't true. I'm trying to add clarity to a vague statement,
| not wage an ideological battle.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Not only should 'paying tax be optional for rich people' be
| illegal, it should be heavily punished. If you are rich, and
| you avoid taxes, you should be punished extremely harshly, to
| the point of poverty or termination.
| conjectures wrote:
| Well, that escalated quickly.
| lifty wrote:
| When the rules make it illegal to not pay tax then rich
| people will pay tax. The rules are made in such way that
| people can avoid paying tax, legally. So you should call
| your representative and make it clear that you want it, but
| I doubt they will listen to you.
| Retric wrote:
| A great deal of tax avoidance strategies used by the rich
| are illegal, but the IRS either doesn't notice or
| frequently chooses not to prosecute them.
|
| A recent great example of why they don't notice. Rich
| individual 1 was paying for an employee's
| children/grandchildren to go to school while deducting
| that money from his salary via a second set of books.
| Rich individual avoids payroll tax, employee avoids
| income tax, and on the surface it looks legal except the
| second set of books made it a clearly illegal action.
| It's exactly that mix of personal and business activities
| that makes such criminal evasion so hard to track.
|
| Another interesting example of not prosecuting, personal
| Roth IRA's may not invest in companies under specific
| conditions and transactions must be at the fair market
| rate. Rich individual 2 broke both rules, but the IRS
| investigation decided to leave it alone. This is adding
| up to hundreds of millions of dollars in tax fraud, but
| if the IRS chooses not to prosecute then he's free and
| clear.
|
| PS: Names redacted to avoid political discussion.
| xorfish wrote:
| You mean that the IRS frequently doesn't have the funds
| to prosecute them.
| Retric wrote:
| It's telling that local law enforcement frequently
| receives money from confiscated items but the IRS
| doesn't. On one hand that's great from a conflict of
| interest standpoint, but when IRS funding pays for it's
| self via taxes collected it's an interesting argument to
| starve them of funds.
| adventured wrote:
| > If you are rich, and you avoid taxes, you should be
| punished extremely harshly, to the point of poverty or
| termination
|
| Advocating murder on HN is wildly inappropriate behavior,
| genocidic bunny.
| Anktionaer wrote:
| If the government does it it's not murder, because murder
| is specifically unlawfull killing. I also agree that tax
| evasion should not be punished by the death penalty, but
| prison and extremely harsh fines would be a good start
| imo.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Murder is not unlawful killing.
|
| Murder is a killing that is not just.
|
| There have been many legal murders. (Look at the Ruby
| ridge incident for a non recent example)
| RHSeeger wrote:
| According to the dictionary, murder is
|
| > the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by
| another.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Does it mention who's laws?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Presumably the laws of the society/government currently
| in charge where the homicide in question took place.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So Nazi's did not commit murder because it was legal. Got
| it.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| According to German law at the time, presumably, they
| were not committing murder. It's hard to say because it's
| entire possible for members of a country's military to
| follow illegal orders and be breaking the law.
|
| According to international law, they were committing
| murder.
|
| Murder is defined as illegal homicide. As such, it can
| only be really be discussed in the context of a legal
| framework. But there can be many legal frameworks at play
| in any one place/instance.
| trasz wrote:
| Capital punishment is not murder. Even killing millions
| of innocent people, like the US likes to do for financial
| and racial reasons, is not technically a murder.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Murder is a killing that is not justified. Having a
| state's blessing does not make it correct.
|
| There is such a thing as legal murder.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| No, there isn't. Murder has a specific meaning, and being
| unlawful is part of it.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Murder has a meaning that predates legal definitions.
| Also, many groups in history are currently accused of
| murder despite it being legal at the time. From slave
| owners to Nazis, from communists to African warlords.
|
| So are these not murders because they are legal?
| trasz wrote:
| I'm not claiming that "murder by state" is somehow
| correct or less evil. My claim is, it's not a murder;
| words have their defined meanings.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So Nazis did not commit murder because it was legal. Got
| it.
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| Sanctioned punishment.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It kind of is though, even if nobody convicted Andrew
| Jackson.
| adrianN wrote:
| I don't think the comment you are replying to was using
| the technical definition of murder.
| henearkr wrote:
| I think they were referring to the fact that the state
| has the monopoly of violence: it is the only moral agent,
| in the country, with the right to kill without making it
| a crime.
|
| So it's a murder "technically physically" but not
| "technically legally".
|
| PS: I'm not endorsing death penalty in anyway. I oppose
| death penalty.
| dmichulke wrote:
| > Large parts of the crypto ecosystem believe that the answer
| should be "yes"
|
| Citation needed.
|
| Also, why do you think crypto people think that rich people
| should pay no tax?
| toofy wrote:
| I suppose people could quibble over what "large" means, but
| there is unquestionably a not insignificant portion who
| want cryptocurrency for the express purpose of keeping the
| government out of money. And another not insignificant
| piece who believe taxes is a key piece of this.
|
| Anyone who believed governments of the world would sit by
| and say "oh, a technology that can greatly aid in tax
| evasion, we'll just let this grow with zero input from
| laws" are fooling themselves.
| ypcx wrote:
| The technology is perfectly sound and in its original
| blueprint it was never meant to be "traded" or
| denominated in an actual mainstream or fiat or government
| currency. So if centralized elements (i.e. major
| exchanges) are the cancer, then regulations such as these
| are the scalpel.
|
| If adopted, a cryptocurrency can perfectly serve an
| ecosystem as an exchange of value, without ever crossing
| the barrier to the mainstream monetary systems. I.e. a
| loaf of bread for a certain fraction of a Bitcoin.
| toss1 wrote:
| That sounds lovely in theory, but once you get to an
| exchange of value, you cross the line into taxable
| territory, and will have to exchange something for fiat
| currencies.
|
| Sure, most minor barter transactions are ignored as de
| minimus, but that does not make it legal (i.e., not tax
| evasion).
|
| So paying your neighbor for a loaf of her home baked
| bread with a wad of coupons for the local store (or
| Satoshis) is probably ignored because she is not an
| official business, but if you do the same at the store,
| or she grows to anything beyond casual home cooking, the
| store and your neighbor will need to pay both sales tax
| and income tax - in fiat - on those transactions.
|
| Same goes for us trading anything large, say we barter my
| car for your boat (or a bunch of BTC, gold, gift cards or
| whatever), we'll have to pay taxes on the transaction, in
| fiat. And we may have the additional pleasure of needing
| to get an appraisal too.
|
| So the idea that crypto currency could never touch fiat
| was never anything more than a lovely figment of the
| internet imagination.
| bgitarts wrote:
| This legislation will not raise more tax revenue like it
| proposes. It will stifle the US crypto industry and push it
| into friendlier jurisdictions. Ultimately it could end up
| reducing tax revenue compared to not touching the crypto
| industry.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| > It will stifle the US crypto industry and push it into
| friendlier jurisdictions.
|
| And nothing of value will be lost
| knorker wrote:
| So in short you're saying that yes actually everyone has to
| follow AML and KYC laws. You can't just wave a magic "it's
| math!" wand and pretend that laws don't apply to you.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are not "clever" for avoiding laws.
| woah wrote:
| Brokers have previously been parties that take custody of
| customer funds. This legislation potentially expands that to
| anyone who publishes code that users can use themselves to
| effect trades, for example, a startup that has deployed a
| smart contract.
|
| The willful stupidity that a lot of posters on here need to
| engage in to get some crypto bashing points is amazing.
|
| Ironically, this will not hurt crypto at all. It will only
| hurt US companies by driving them out. US residents will
| still be able to access and use smart contracts supplied by
| foreign startups unless the government makes crypto
| completely illegal.
| knorker wrote:
| Please take some time to read the hacker news community
| guidelines.
| hkt wrote:
| "forced to surveil their users"
|
| Or as it is otherwise known, abide by the same KYC rules as
| banks.
|
| I'd guess the vague wording is to allow regulators and the
| judiciary to respond flexibly to changing practices. It might
| be broad but it isn't poor lawmaking: it does exactly as it
| intends to. Even using brokerage as an analogy makes sense to
| respond to a system in which by design almost everyone of
| significance is a middleman of some kind.
|
| Fundamentally this is what will allow bitcoin to thrive: this
| is part of the process of becoming legitimised. It isn't what
| the crypto-libertarians hoped for, but what they hoped for in
| the beginning was endless deflation, untaxable income and
| speculative gains. It wasn't good for anyone but them.
|
| This is a step to something better, namely a new financial
| system in which upstarts are able to enter quickly and on
| technical merit alone. That is worth a lot, and won't happen
| without bitcoin entering the regulated mainstream.
| noduerme wrote:
| How can anyone enter the market quickly with an app that
| takes crypto as payment, if you have to register as a broker
| and meet KYC standards? Suppose you want to sell character
| costumes or start a subscription podcast in crypto, rather
| than paying royalties to Apple or having payment processing
| through Visa. Are you going to demand ID verification from
| all your listeners? It basically makes it so onerous to a
| startup that _no_ innovation can happen
| trasz wrote:
| Can you give example of a cryptocurrency startup which
| innovated anything useful?
| cle wrote:
| Brave.
|
| (This question often leads to moving goalposts and
| quibbling over definitions of "useful innovations".)
| astoor wrote:
| _> Can you give example of a cryptocurrency startup which
| innovated anything useful?_
|
| This is a trap I've seen many technical folks on HN fall
| into - they define "useful" along the lines of
| "beneficial", or "productive", or "worthwhile", rather
| than simply "is used". Think of casino tokens. They have
| no intrinsic value, and can only be used within very
| limited set of environments, so you could think of them
| as useless in the strict sense. But that doesn't stop
| large numbers of people using large numbers of them on a
| regular basis, and the operators make hundreds of
| billions a year from the people using them, so they are
| "useful" in the sense of "being used" to serve a strong
| human desire (just not to make the world a better place).
| CPLX wrote:
| Yes you are correct. Cryptocurrency at the moment is used
| for speculation, drug sales, scams, and evading financial
| regulation.
|
| Those are _huge_ valuable use cases. However it doesn't
| follow that we should necessarily facilitate those uses.
| trasz wrote:
| As opposed to defining "useful" along the lines of
| "generating profit".
|
| So, sure, cryptocurrency startups can innovate a new way
| of making money. But it doesn't make them useful. One
| could argue it doesn't even make them not harmful.
| astoor wrote:
| I would also prefer "useful", as in "capable of being put
| to use", to apply to uses with net positive outcomes for
| society - I was just trying to make the point that,
| unfortunately, many others don't.
| noduerme wrote:
| I'm reticent to get into this because it involves value
| judgments about what's "useful". Are in-game skin
| purchases useful? Not really. Should we prevent then from
| being sold because they don't match your definition of
| usefulness?
|
| To my thinking, provably fair casino games are a useful
| innovation that sprang from cryptocurrency. Decentralized
| poker is another. If you find the entire global gaming
| industry useless, then I guess those are also useless
| innovations. Again, that's a value judgment.
|
| I don't think it's fair to conflate the people/businesses
| trying to profit from the crypto speculation craze,
| pyramid shemes or shitcoins, with e.g. businesses that
| want to accept crypto to avoid paying a % of their income
| to Visa. Yet that's what this law would do.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Bitcoin already is regulated - piling on as much regulation
| as possible isn't what's going to make it more main stream.
| This bill allows the request to treat miners as brokers,
| which is absurd considering that not all miners operate in
| the U.S. Any miner that does operate in the U.S. will hash
| locally and send verified blocks from international nodes, so
| it won't work anyways.
|
| Upstarts are able to enter quickly based on technical merit
| alone RIGHT NOW. How does adding regulation simplify that for
| them? It doesn't - it makes it far more restrictive. You must
| be on crack to believe these provisions "help" crypto assets.
| This bill goes against the design philosophy of peer-to-peer
| transactions.
| hkt wrote:
| > This bill goes against the design philosophy of peer-to-
| peer transactions.
|
| Yes: because that design philosophy is counter to that of
| consumer friendly, regulated markets. What will make
| bitcoin mass market is the ability of regular investors to
| get involved with the kind of safety net regulations
| require. The alternative being that bitcoin maintains its
| already shady reputation as something for money laundering
| and buying drugs (crack, perhaps?) online. Cleaning up that
| reputation and its causes is the job of regulation, and it
| will work.
| jkepler wrote:
| However, a far larger portion of illicit drug
| transactions are for cash dollars than for bitcoin;
| estimates are 2-5% illicit transactions globally in fiat
| currencies, and about 0.34% illicit in bitcoin in 2020 (a
| rate that's fallen significantly since 2019 as we see
| more mainstream early adoption if bitcoin [1].
|
| This proposed regulation doesn't address the problems you
| evoke, and its an attack on fundamental human rights such
| as privacy.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-
| fal...
| cinquemb wrote:
| > However, a far larger portion of illicit drug
| transactions are for cash dollars than for bitcoin
|
| The regulatory system, and people who are ok with
| deferring to it in its existing incarnation (i.e. the
| revolving door between people within TBTF bailouts-every-
| day with "open" "market" operations banks [where these
| cash dollars inevitably end up] and the people who "look"
| after them system), are fine with this because slaps on
| the wrists and fines are considered the cost of doing
| business and there can't be anyway possible to live and
| exchange value without them being involved under the
| guise of "protection" or "else" racket.
|
| Robin Hanson would probably call this phenomenon a form
| of "Elite Tax" on society. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/08/how-high-our-
| elite-ta...
| RandomLensman wrote:
| If the point is that in crypto 3rd party payment processing
| and money transfers (for example) should be regulated
| differently than in the other parts of the financial
| system, let's make it.
|
| I don't think "design philosophy" will be enough, though.
| The points to make might be more like: is the regulation in
| normal finance fit for purpose? Should there be an
| electronic version of cash within some limits and could
| that be partly done with crypto (same discussion as with
| CBDC at the moment). Should there be a difference between
| an individual miner and an industrial one?
|
| Failing financial systems can have huge social and policy
| implications so technical merit is but one consideration.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| It's basically the same with the GDPR, it talks more about
| principles than companies or technologies to be able to adapt
| to a fast changing field - which I appreciate as a citizen
| but as an implementor I prefer the checklists of PCIDSS which
| are not vague.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| The fact that the government routinely threatens to "throw
| the book" at people, using various "vaguely worded" laws, to
| get them to plead guilty to crimes they may or may not have
| committed (without their time in court) is a prime reason why
| those laws are bad.
|
| > We believe you had drugs on you, even though we couldn't
| find them. We also see you play World of Warcraft and that
| you're used the in game auction house to sell your items for
| in game money to other players. If you don't please guilty to
| the drug charge, we're going to hit you with 1,000+ counts of
| of violations of the IBCSP (or whatever this law is called);
| you'd be looking at 1,000 years in prison and a 1,000,0000$
| fine, minimum.
|
| The US government _does_ things like that. And, as such
| (because they have shown they cannot be trusted to act in the
| spirit of the law), we need to limit what powers we give
| them. I find it astonishing that anyone doesn't realize this.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The most booming business in crypto is the new category of
| organized crime.
|
| There are a lot of positive or interesting aspects to crypto,
| but the prevalence of tax evasion, money laundering and grifts
| of varying scale dominates the conversation. Regulation is
| inevitable.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Is it really a privacy disaster? Blockchain is already a
| privacy disaster as all of your transactions are on a public
| ledger.
|
| It just puts a nail in the coffin of the idea that blockchain
| is going to be some libertarian dream of freedom from
| regulation and a magic bullet for getting around rules. Of
| course this was coming.
| heliodor wrote:
| If you're going to quote the article, please mark it as such.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| > include anyone who is "responsible for and regularly
| providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets"
|
| Does that include PDFs, audio books, software, and photos? Web
| apps or plugins? "Asset" is monstrously vague.
|
| Does Drivethrurpg have to worry about this?
| meragrin_ wrote:
| My first thought were in game assets.
| shanebrunette wrote:
| Founder of cryptotaxcalculator.io here. First of all I agree
| the proposed rules aren't particularly well thought out. The
| thing is, the 1099 forms that the IRS gets from existing
| brokers don't make any sense because as soon as you move funds
| between exchanges the broker can no longer accurately track the
| cost basis. Pre-crypto you generally wouldn't have this
| problem. From a tax compliance perspective it is an absolute
| nightmare, and I am sure this is just an ill thought out
| attempt at trying to make their lives easier. Probably not the
| best way to go about it though. There is a lot to solve in this
| space.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| One of the underlying problems is that the capital gains tax
| code itself is designed for a world from a pre-financialized,
| pre-electronic world from the 1950s. The idea that someone
| might trade in and out of positions within milliseconds,
| possibly using complex derivatives or sophisticated leveraged
| is completely absent from the code. There's nothing in the
| code that addresses even how to treat trades that are done in
| the same day. Wash sale rules are literally non-determinable
| for high frequency traders. There's no guidance whatsoever on
| when and how derivatives are rolled against the a position in
| the underlying.
|
| I run a HFT operation, and just computing my US tax returns
| required thousands of lines of code of custom software. And
| then to actually file it, I print off a PDF, thousands of
| pages long of each and every individual trade. Not a CSV, not
| a data file, literally a printout. As if some IRS accountant
| is going to manually go through millions of rows line by line
| with an adding machine.
| bequanna wrote:
| Ha, I always wondered what HFT tax returns looked like.
|
| Of course, the IRS cannot and will not check every
| transaction. But I do wonder if they actually verify some
| subset of the reported transactions, or would this only
| happen in an audit?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Luckily, never had to go through an audit yet. But spot
| checking a subset of transactions isn't actually
| workable. Because of the wash sale rule, the adjusted
| basis on any single transaction is path dependent on both
| the previous and future trades in that symbol.
| [deleted]
| freeone3000 wrote:
| This is also true of stocks transferred between brokerages --
| it's supposed to be transfered with. If it's not, there's a
| correction line on the 1099 with a space for accurate cost
| basis info, and you'd provide the original purchase receipt
| as an attachment. There might be issues in the space, but
| cost basis on a transferred equity isn't one of them.
| NickM wrote:
| Yes, this is correct. The technical term for this is an
| "in-kind" transfer, and while it might occasionally allow
| for things to slip through the cracks, it certainly hasn't
| stopped capital gain reporting requirements from being both
| feasible and largely effective.
| christophilus wrote:
| > responsible for and regularly providing any service
| effectuating transfers of digital assets
|
| Do they define digital assets? Because my Google Doc is a
| digital asset. If I transfer it to a friend, is Google now a
| broker?
| Communitivity wrote:
| I would suspect that under the current proposed wording, yes.
| Facebook, Google, etc. all become brokers. This could be a
| means for the government to go after social platforms and get
| transparent vies on all the social media activities of U.S.
| citizens. It is scary.
| [deleted]
| verdverm wrote:
| It's hard to take the EFF seriously with their word choices of
| late
| xunn0026 wrote:
| I have just read the article and the title is spot on. It's a
| digital law hidden in a law about highways and it is a privacy
| and regulatory disaster.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| It's not a "digital law", because I have no idea what that's
| supposed to mean.
|
| It's not "hidden". It's part of a law. Same font size as the
| rest. Everyone newspaper is writing about it.
|
| The law isn't about "highways". It's about infrastructure.
| And these provisions, specifically, are one of the attempts
| to raise the funds financing the investments specified in
| that law.
| verdverm wrote:
| I read the article and was referring to the use of words in
| the body like "surveillance" for a one time collection of
| required KYC information.
|
| It has more "thrilling" words as well.
|
| But generally, over the years the EFF has lost my support and
| is viewed as yet another fringe voice with eccentric
| overtones.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I believe crypto industry lobbyists got concessions on this
| earlier today, but I could be wrong.
|
| I wish there was a way to restrict these massive catch all
| bills that include everything in one package so that it's
| impossible to debate on a case by case basis.
| dannyw wrote:
| Link/source to your first claim?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Reddit link, but sources included here: https://www.reddi
| t.com/r/ethfinance/comments/owtmn1/cryptocu...
| flyingfences wrote:
| The "concessions" are the wording included in the OP. It
| used to be even worse.
| henearkr wrote:
| I usually side with the EFF, but here going at total war against
| cryptocurrencies seems right to me.
|
| I don't see any scientific or technological application that
| could benefit humanity and would be developed from blockchain
| technology.
|
| I tried very hard to figure out uses for the hash machines once
| the cryptocurrencies will disappear, but sadly I could think of
| none. All of this silicon, these PCBs, will just be junk.
| jl2718 wrote:
| What you are observing is the ugly opportunism of this war, and
| it is a war, between systems that are controlled by powerful
| people, and systems that are controlled by algorithms.
|
| This is not a new conflict. Democracy was an algorithmic
| victory until powerful people learned to subvert it. So too was
| religion, money, laws etc. This is how civilization advances.
| Cryptocurrency is a pure thing, an algorithmic method of
| storage, control and distribution of value, that came about
| because the old ways were failing.
|
| Now the old powers are fighting back. It's important to realize
| that this is the only reason that cryptocurrency has any
| speculative value at all.
|
| If the treasury / federal reserve had seen bitcoin and adopted
| a protocol for algorithmic control of the money supply, and a
| safer wallet for dollar holders, then Bitcoin would have zero
| value, and the Silk Road would never have happened. If they had
| seen ethereum, and adopted smart contracts to replace the
| opaque banking and investment industry, then Ethereum would
| have zero value, and the iron finance rug pull would never have
| happened.
|
| This is not about revenue; the treasury balance is overflowing.
| It's not about keeping us safe; violent crime is nowhere on the
| agenda. It's not consumer protection; the SEC refuses to ever
| go after the many VC-backed mega rug pulls pushed on retail
| investors as utility tokens. This is simply about power.
| They're not afraid of scammers and criminals. They're afraid of
| people like you shifting anger from the obvious canards to the
| bigger picture.
|
| They're not out to destroy cryptocurrency either. They want to
| control it so that they can keep siphoning money out out of
| people trying to mitigate the problems that their own monetary
| policy caused, just like 401k of the 90s. I say this to point
| out that you will not get what you want out of this. It will
| just become a bigger scam on everybody, established and
| protected by the full force of the law.
|
| I wonder who it is exactly that you think is looking out for
| you in all of this.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I am sympathetic, I don't see much use for them. But...
|
| Just because you or I don't see the use case doesn't mean
| something should be illegal or that we should go to war with
| it.
|
| We've made this mistake before (prohibition, the war on drugs).
| If people want to waste their time/money on X, that's on them.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Agreed, there is zero use cases outside of currency and
| unfortunately, most of the currencies are little more than
| gambling, pump/dump and pyramid schemes. The cryptos always
| crow about it being so censorship resistant. I guess we'll see
| how resistant it really is.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| "I don't see any scientific or technological application that
| could benefit humanity and would be developed from blockchain
| technology."
|
| Cool, but there are plenty of financial, economic, and
| political applications of blockchain that will benefit
| humanity. Just because you don't understand the use case
| doesn't mean it doesn't have one.
| henearkr wrote:
| It's not that I don't understand the use case.
|
| It's that the current use cases can be either replaced by
| preexisting less compute-intensive tech, or that the usage is
| just meaningless (gambling-like speculation, failed attempt
| at anonymity, tax avoidance, etc).
|
| However my comment is as well a call to everybody to think
| about it!
|
| I know I'm not very brilliant, so if anybody can do a favor
| to the world and find out something interesting, I'd be
| extremely happy :)
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| "It's that the current use cases can be either replaced by
| preexisting less compute-intensive tech, or that the usage
| is just meaningless (gambling-like speculation, failed
| attempt at anonymity, tax avoidance, etc)."
|
| The fact that you've binned all the usage into the
| "meaningless" category means you don't understand the use
| case at all. It's an alternative to the current hegemonic
| global financial system centrally controlled by the USA.
| You might think it's useless but plenty of people disagree
| and are using it in a meaningful way.
|
| You put on a facade of humility and objectivity but your
| bias against cryptocurrency is pretty blatant.
| henearkr wrote:
| People are burning coal to mine virtual coins, so yes I
| am biased against that until I see any real benefit.
|
| Can you call this biased?
|
| And what you call financial hegemony is only the
| corollary of the commercial interconnection between
| world's countries, and the fact that the USA manage the
| biggest lender bank ever (the IMF). That would still be
| the same using a BTC-based IMF.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| You come off as rather disingenuous in your way of
| conversation; pretending on one hand that you don't
| really know that much or have an opinion but in reality,
| it's something you've done a considerable amount of
| research in and have a strong opinion on. It's almost
| like you're a honeypot encouraging people to argue with
| you. It screams bad faith discussion and I just don't
| like it. Be honest in who you are, what you know, and
| what you stand for.
|
| PS: There would be no BTC-based IMF, just like there's no
| gold-based IMF. That's literally the whole point of
| Bitcoin - decentralized finance with no need for an
| _International_ _Monetary_ _Fund_ regulating its monetary
| policy.
| henearkr wrote:
| You misunderstand.
|
| What I honestly don't know is if there exist useful
| algorithms making usage of all these hashes produced by
| BTC-mining machines.
|
| It's a very precise challenge. And it could change the
| face of the industry. I'm for real.
|
| For example, any possible usage in mathematics? Or maybe
| in physics, by switching in a different space to perform
| the calculations? I'm just throwing ideas.
|
| Figure a world where you cannot use these machines for
| BTC anymore, because "regulations". Then, what do you do
| with them? Throw them? What a waste!
|
| Now you understand my point?
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| I'd say that the cryptography and computer science field
| as a whole have tremendously benefitted from
| cryptocurrency indirectly. It has led to numerous new
| cryptographic protocols that are being used outside of
| blockchain. POW is an effective tool being used by
| websites to fight DDOS attacks and spam. Zero knowledge
| proofs that were originally designed for Proof of stake
| are being used for credit cards. Internet security is
| being reworked from scratch to address the many security
| issues that blockchain has uncovered.
|
| It's been hugely beneficial for science from a
| theoretical and academic POV. Just like space exploration
| has no obvious benefits but fertilizes the field of
| engineering with new technology, cryptocurrency is
| currently doing the same to Computer Science.
|
| And E-waste is a huge problem in general, it's not
| specific to bitcoin. Online gaming with powerful GPUs has
| zero benefit to society and also generates lots of
| useless energy consumption and e-waste. Why don't we
| brick all of the playstations instead of a whole
| financial ecosystem?
| dogman144 wrote:
| > I don't see any scientific or technological application that
| could benefit humanity and would be developed from blockchain
| technology.
|
| Assuming you work in tech, you must be aware how similar
| attitudes existed (within tech, as well) about what the
| internet itself would provide.
|
| How are you so certain that:
|
| A) you understand all the possible directions a new, network-
| effect driven tech could take in its applications
|
| B) none of them add value to humanity
|
| C) there are no parallels in your statement to "well horses
| work fine, why do I need cars."
| henearkr wrote:
| As I said, I hoped I could think of some use for these hash
| machines. Same for the blockchain tech itself, i.e. some
| usage that would not be completely replaceable by some less
| compute-intensive tech.
|
| I honestly hope those usages exist. I really do. But now I
| don't think they do.
|
| But, frankly, even for Internet itself everybody could see
| the benefit quite early.
|
| Anyway, if you do find interesting uses that are not
| replaceable by simpler things, you would save a lot of
| garbage!! And thus would do a favor to the environment.
|
| So yeah I hope I'm wrong.
| dogman144 wrote:
| A Classic quote from Paul Krugam indicates that quite a few
| smart folks, so not everybody, did not see the internet's
| benefit quite early or even much later.
| henearkr wrote:
| Internet was already useful very early to transfer
| physics experiment data between labs (at the CERN).
| goatmeal wrote:
| when I visit a church, they ask everyone for a little money so
| they can keep the lights on and do interesting things once in a
| while. nobody expects the church to KYC everyone who puts a
| dollar in the collection plate. why should that be any
| different if the meeting takes place on a website about
| something other than religion? I donate cryptocurrency to
| forums and microblogging services to help them keep the lights
| on. we should be treated the same even if we don't believe in
| god. the owner does not need to ask for permission from anybody
| or depend on an intermediary to accept the money and they do
| not need my information. if you don't see why this is of
| benefit to someone then I suggest you try to operate a forum
| and go through the trouble to make ends meet.
| henearkr wrote:
| (Almost) everybody do it with PayPal, Patreon, etc.
|
| I understand that you feel uneasy to theoretically depend on
| these companies, even if in practice you encounter no real
| difficulty.
|
| Your fear is unnecessary... unless you do things really frown
| upon. Even porn and sex services are successfully using some
| of the online services I quoted above.
|
| For hitmen and substances I don't really know, but those are
| _really_ frown upon.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > I don't see any scientific or technological application
|
| That's a defensible position. But how does that justify the
| government going to "total war". There are plenty of things
| that have no scientific or technological application. Reality
| TV, social media, fashion, nightclubs, sports, bakeries, those
| stupid outfits people dress pets up in.
|
| At what point did people stop saying "it's a free country"? So
| you don't like some thing and don't see much merit in it. At
| what point did people's knee-jerk response to that change from
| "not my cup of tea, but you do you, man" to "that thing is
| completely worthless, everyone who likes it must be an idiot,
| and therefore the government should abolish it"
| henearkr wrote:
| Well, you're right, my comment actually lacks of the spelling
| out of the negative part of this technology!!
|
| As the usefulness is very doubtful but the energy consumption
| is utterly real, that is a net negative for the environment.
|
| The electronic garbage, too, a huge problem.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I actually agree with you! PoW (proof-of-work) coins
| produce a big negative externality. That being said
| Ethereum is migrating to a PoS (proof-of-stake) system by
| year end that virtually eliminates all the problems you
| enumerate.
|
| Even if you believe in a policy response, wouldn't you
| agree that it'd be better specifically target proof-of-work
| blockchains rather than crypto in general? Ironically this
| bill may actually do the opposite. It places a much higher
| burden of DeFi and stablecoins, which are mostly Ethereum
| native. It will probably shift usage to large centralized
| exchanges, which generally favors PoW based Bitcoin.
| henearkr wrote:
| Well, a finer policy would probably be better, I agree.
|
| But, in this case, even if the loss of a beautiful peace
| of engineering is always a pity (but it is not even lost,
| because the source code itself has no reason to be
| forbidden!), I don't see really what is the loss for the
| world.
|
| As I said in another comment, if you use a VPN, you can
| access preexisting online banking like PayPal, and to it
| while escaping surveillance and censure from any
| dictatorship you live in.
|
| So e.g. if you reimplement whatever usage you found for
| some Ethereum contracts, in a non-blockchain technology,
| then you can just access it through VPNs whenever that
| becomes necessary.
| asdff wrote:
| Maybe they could sell the GPUs to gamers who are desperate for
| even 3 year old cards.
| tromp wrote:
| > the hash machines
|
| Not all PoW is hash based. Some, like Cuckatoo Cycle [1], are
| based on writing and reading random bits within hundreds of MB
| of memory, and ASICs for such PoW are dominated by SRAM, which
| can in principle be repurposed.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
| henearkr wrote:
| Also PoS. Those are the grey area where I don't have as much
| strong opinions anymore.
|
| As they are less compute-intensive, the benefit is more
| likely.
| nprz wrote:
| > I don't see any scientific or technological application that
| could benefit humanity and would be developed from blockchain
| technology.
|
| Bitcoin is helping humanity right now as I type. There are
| millions who live under authoritative regimes that do not have
| access to banking services. Bitcoin gives anybody with an
| internet connection the ability to hold, save, and transfer
| value. You are condemning something you do not understand.
| Bitcoin is a technology that improves human rights.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...
| henearkr wrote:
| (Bitcoin is no currency...)
|
| I put it bluntly sorry, but to be more explicit:
|
| because of its volatility, BTC is very difficult to adopt for
| real transactions.
|
| Also, with a simple VPN, you access PayPal and you're good to
| go.
|
| I'd argue that the real tech saving the world right now is
| the VPN.
|
| Even to use BTC somehow you will need VPN, because those
| dictatorships will block the IPs.
| nprz wrote:
| > The dollar volume of crypto received by users in Nigeria
| in May was $2.4bn, up from $684m last December, according
| to blockchain research firm Chainalysis. And the true scale
| of crypto flows through Africa's largest economy is likely
| to be much larger, with many trades untraceable by
| analysts.
|
| Over $2.4bn in value transferred, but you're telling me no
| one is using it? Transfer in BTC and convert to a stable
| coin if you're worried about volatility. Also Nigeria's
| currency, the naira has a 12% inflation rate. I'm not sure
| holding BTC is more of a risk than a currency that's
| guaranteed to lose 12% of its value each year.
|
| A VPN will not protect you if PayPal decides to freeze your
| account. It will also not hide any of your transactions
| from PayPal.
| henearkr wrote:
| Nothing hints at a usage "as a currency" from Nigerian
| users.
|
| Most likely, those are scammers of other illegal
| activities and they hoard as much as possible of BTC
| without really caring how much exactly it amounts to.
|
| Also Nigeria is not an oppressive regime.
|
| Edited: ok it's oppressive. However it's still somehow a
| democracy (with all the constraints of an islamic
| democracy).
|
| PayPal has competitors, so they will be more than happy
| to take you as a customer if PayPal banned you.
| nprz wrote:
| Read the article linked above and I think it will be
| difficult to resist the conclusion that Nigeria is an
| oppressive regime. There's even a wikipedia page
| dedicated to documenting human right abuses in Nigeria:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Nigeria
|
| > Last October, Nigeria was rocked by the largest
| protests in decades, as many thousands marched against
| police brutality, and the infamous Sars police unit. The
| "EndSars" protests saw abuses by security forces, who
| beat demonstrators, and used water cannon and teargas on
| them. More than 50 protesters were killed, at least 12 of
| them shot dead at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos on 20
| October
|
| > The clampdown was financial too. Civil society
| organisations, protest groups and individuals in favour
| of the demonstrations who were raising funds to free
| protesters or supply demonstrators with first aid and
| food had their bank accounts suddenly suspended.
|
| > Feminist Coalition, a collective of 13 young women
| founded during the demonstrations, came to national
| attention as they raised funds for protest groups and
| supported demonstration efforts. When the women's
| accounts were also suspended, the group began taking
| bitcoin donations, eventually raising $150,000 for its
| fighting fund through cryptocurrency.
|
| > Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and a prominent
| advocate of cryptocurrencies, reshared the FemCo bitcoin
| donation page, further drawing the ire of Nigeria's
| government, which last month suspended Twitter in
| Nigeria.
| henearkr wrote:
| Actually I do.
|
| I edited my comment though to reflect that, yes they are
| oppressive as they do shadowy things with the police and
| kill people. There is probably a mix of maybe-
| unregrettable (killing dangerous religious extremists
| political opponents) and regrettable (killing anti-islam
| feminists) events.
|
| Nigeria is an extremely violent society. Think Mexico.
|
| So police violence, if regrettable, is pretty much a
| corollary.
|
| Sorry but it does not seem weird to you, that among all
| the dictatorships on Earth, only the scammers' paradise
| Nigeria has adopted cryptocurrencies at a large scale?
| Why not Cuba?
|
| About feminist activism: okay but then what about in
| other muslim countries, where the problem is similar? Why
| is it in Nigeria that the adoption is so big?
|
| My point is that these citizen organizations could have
| just used VPN+PayPal very easily for their activism, but
| it's because BTC was already mainstream among the
| omnipresent scam businesses, that they had the idea to
| try.
| nprz wrote:
| Cubans do use bitcoin: https://www.coindesk.com/cuba-
| protests-bitcoin-donations
|
| It doesn't matter if you use VPN with your paypal
| account, you can still be locked out of your account and
| your funds frozen. This is not true of bitcoin. No one
| can freeze your bitcoin, no one can prevent transfer.
| henearkr wrote:
| The usage by Cubans is completely dwarfed by the one by
| Nigerians. The population size can probably explain it
| partly, but I don't think it's sufficient.
|
| But most people depend on platforms to use BTC, so it's
| the same problem as with PayPal.
|
| Also when I say PayPal, think "all PayPal-like services",
| including all the competitors.
|
| In the cases where users were banned, PayPal did not
| prevent them from migrating their funds to others forms,
| so it's not really freezing.
|
| Let's take China instead of Cuba because there are more
| data. In January 2021, Nigeria made 32% of BTC exchanges,
| whereas China only 7%. That shows you there is really
| some effect independent from the population size and from
| the nature of the political regime.
| api wrote:
| It's precisely when people feel this way about things that
| large chunks of our civil liberties are forfeit.
|
| Precedents: the war on drugs, crusades against porn, alcohol
| prohibition, the war on terror, mandatory minimum sentencing,
| etc.
|
| It's a lynch mob mentality writ large and allows reckless
| legislators and police to gallop right over all kinds of civil
| boundaries that very much exist for a reason.
|
| A much narrower set of solutions could address your concerns: a
| tax on proof of work mining, a ban on the sale of hardware
| whose sole purpose is cryptocurrency mining, or a ban on
| domestic exchanges converting money to/from cryptocurrencies
| that use high-resource proof of work mechanisms.
|
| I see no reason to ban proof of stake or other consensus
| mechanism cryptocurrencies, and stepping up enforcement of
| existing KYC/AML regulations would help fight money laundering.
|
| I also must point out that real estate, sham art auctions, sham
| investments and businesses, and numerous other mechanisms
| collectively account for the vast bulk of all money laundering.
| Cryptocurrency is a niche player. It's also a niche player in
| the street drug market where the vast majority of transactions
| use physical cash.
|
| As far as bubbles and speculative manias go... it's legal for
| an adult to buy a lotto ticket (that is run by the state!) or
| go to a casino (permitted and regulated by the state). This is
| no worse. I might support raising taxes on short term
| speculative sorts of financial games, but those would also need
| to be applied to high frequency trading and speculative games
| run by hedge funds in conventional markets. Those are much
| larger than anything in crypto.
|
| I say all this as a mostly cryptocurrency skeptic.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| You can't compare bitcoin to porn, gambling, drugs and
| alcohol. Bitcoin is the only one that doesn't affect dopamine
| levels in the brain, and that virtually no one would seek out
| if it was suddenly illegal.
| henearkr wrote:
| Well, a huge lot of people make usage of bitcoin like it is
| gambling (i.e. as a speculative asset).
|
| Cannot make generalities of course, but still.
| phase5 wrote:
| There is a newer more comprehensive one which is worse for
| privacy https://www.coindesk.com/new-crypto-bill-in-us-congress-
| is-t...
| oliwarner wrote:
| Isn't this _just_ an attempt to bring crypto in line with
| existing money-laundering rules? Don 't $10k+ money movements
| already trigger IRS notifications?
|
| I know that's a bit whatabouttery but if we want to legitimise
| blockchain payments, we have to do more to kick organised crime
| and tax evaders out. Pretending that absolute privacy is always
| best is a criminal wet dream.
|
| _Waves goodbye to his karma_
| davidcbc wrote:
| The vast majority of cryptocurrency advocates are speculators
| that don't want to legitimize blockchain payments, they only
| want the number to go up. Criminal activity has been shown over
| and over to be the only "legitimate" use case of
| cryptocurrency, so if you eliminate that the number might go
| down.
| jl2718 wrote:
| I'm sure you are speaking for yourself here with such
| authority.
| dylkil wrote:
| Why is hacker news so salty about cryptocurrency
| rantwasp wrote:
| I think it's a classic example of myopically focusing on some
| aspects of a technology while missing the entire point.
|
| You'll hear about net benefits to society (like those are easy
| to measure), about power consumption (like all if a sudden
| everyone is an arbiter of the market and decided: too much
| power), about how it's a ponzi scheme (without understanding
| what a ponzi scheme is). All talking point of the anti-
| cryptocurrency agenda.
|
| Curious to see how/if this changes in the next 5-10 years.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| Lots of tech nerds are upset that they understand technology
| but not finance and economics.
| grumblenum wrote:
| The allure of becoming a billionaire with almost no productive
| effort spent is the heart and soul of the pop-tech. Crypto that
| you have becomes more valuable only if more people decide they
| want it _after_ you have your position. If you 're "hodling"
| then you have an incentive to be a promoter.
| Sargos wrote:
| HN folks on the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.
| Lame."
|
| Tech forums have always been fairly anti-technology and dislike
| anything new until the rest of society fully adopts it.
| MelonTree wrote:
| HN tends to be very skeptical in general. It's easy to sound
| intelligent with a well-reasoned negative opinion than it is
| with an optimistic one. I think with cryptocurrency in
| particular a lot of HN'ers have really just dug their heals in
| and don't want to admit they were wrong.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is currently causing more harm to society than
| good. PoW is a large reason for that, but even PoS will have
| huge negative impacts as it is mostly used for speculating and
| illegal activity. It doesn't solve any problems other than ones
| that are better solved by VPNs.
| rantwasp wrote:
| Okay. Let's play the: X is causing more harm to society than
| good.
|
| X=guns Are guns causing more harm than good? Should we ban
| guns?
|
| X=religion. Is religion causing more harm than good? Should
| we ban any form of religion?
|
| X=social media. Is social media causing more harm than good?
| I heard Facebook consumes more power than the entire state of
| Argentina! Should we ban Facebook?
|
| X=USD the dollar. 95% of criminal activity uses USD. 95%!
| It's clear to me that if no dollar we could prevent a lot of
| criminal activity. Should we ban the USD?
|
| X=VPNs Used to circumvent local laws!!! Are the causing more
| harm than good? Ban VPNs you say?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Are guns causing more harm than good?
|
| Guns have a propensity to do a lot of good, if they were
| sanely regulated they could easily do more good than harm.
|
| >Is religion causing more harm than good?
|
| Hard to say, religion does a lot of good. Keeping people
| scared of god is an incredibly strong motivator for many,
| and most of what religion prescribes is good. I wouldn't
| mind taxing religion, but it's unconstitutional.
|
| >Is social media causing more harm than good?
|
| I think the answer here is clearly no. Yes, social media
| causes harm, but it causes much more joy.
|
| >The Dollar
|
| I understand that you're joking here but the amount of good
| the dollar does so clearly surpasses the harm its illicit
| use cause that I don't find this very funny.
|
| Anyway, no one is trying to ban cryptocurrency.
| rantwasp wrote:
| Guns do a lot of good? I'm sorry we're probably living in
| different universes. In my, I see school shootings after
| school shooting with lots of thoughts and prayers
| sprinkled in between. It's the best
| guns+religion==winning!
|
| > no one is trying to ban crypto no one is trying to ban
| it yet. I'm giving it 5 years until it's outright banned.
|
| Also, if you cripple something to the point where it's
| unusable it's virtually the same as banning it.
| dylkil wrote:
| >I understand that you're joking here but the amount of
| good the dollar does so clearly surpasses the harm
|
| This is the problem with your view of crypto, you fail to
| see the good
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Crypto is not an effective currency. Currencies need 3
| things to be effective: store of value, unit of account,
| and medium of exchange. Crypto fails at storing value and
| being a medium of exchange. It's value is completely
| unpredictable and transferring it is slow, costly, and
| annoying. Many of these problems could conceivably be
| solved, but without government backing crypto will never
| be a good store of value, as macro economic policy is
| required to keep currencies stable.
| dylkil wrote:
| Crypto is more than currency at this stage, you argument
| solely applies to bitcoin.
| rantwasp wrote:
| You're being selective.
|
| Crypto transfers are slow? jesus, did tou ever do a wire?
| have you seen moving something take days? compared to
| that minutes is instant.
|
| You're gonna tell me about CC processing next. Hate to
| break it to you but when you're paying with a CC you're
| not actually paying. An auth happens but the real payment
| happens when the transaction is settled (days later). So:
| days vs minutes in BTC case. wow, crypto sooo slow.
|
| Macro economic policy? Oh yeah. That is working really
| really well. The government working to protect you.
| lawn wrote:
| So a VPN will allow me to send money anywhere I choose? To
| accept payments without the risk of a third party arbitrarily
| shutting me down? To send donations to WikiLeaks while the US
| government forces payment processors and banks to abandon
| them?
|
| No, of course not.
| eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
| Why do we allow some clueless, incompetent old dicks to make laws
| like this? Governments are too powerful. This system has to
| change. The role of a government has to be reduced to a minimum.
|
| Hopefully we'll get there in the next 200-300 years.
| chrisan wrote:
| because more people vote for them
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